[Mageia-dev] E17 packaging

[Michael Scherer]

Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 à 23:12 +0200, Florian Hubold a écrit :
> Am 26.10.2011 22:06, schrieb Michael Scherer:
> > Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 à 18:58 +0200, Florian Hubold a écrit :
> >
> >> If keeping old releases unchanged from distro to distro version is
> >> your vision of improving quality and more satisfying for our end-users,
> >> that's not my vision, sorry.
> > Then we should simply remove e17 altogether. Because, by choice of the
> > developpers, it is not stable enough to be packaged.
> >
> Yes, altogether that would be a logical conclusion, sadly but true.
> Seems some maintainers can actually be worse than infamous 'nobody'.
> 
> How to deal with that on the upgrade to mga2 in packaging terms,
> display a message to E17 users to the extent of:
> 
>     "... e17 has been removed to improve on mageia overall quality,
>     please use another window manager / desktop environment ... "
> 
> 
> And please: this is meant as a serious question following the
> above conclusion ...

That's a good question but in fact, the situation is not really new.
That's already something we should do for any software dropped. 

Either we drop because something do not work anymore ( for example,
something unmaintained upstream, not rebuildable and no one able to fix
), or we drop because we replace.

Replacing is seamless and we do it quite often, dropping is not. 

I would propose that we add a conflict on mageia-release, and make a
note in release notes. So on upgrade, package is removed, and people
have documentation.


Now, for the other problem of providing e17 without bypassing all our
update procedure, there is several possible solutions :

1) We could move that to another repository, outside of Mageia, with
different rules until that's sutable to be integrated properly. 3rd
parties repos are bad IMHO, but if people do not want to follow the
policy for whatever reasons, that's unavoidable. 

2) We could find a way to not place some packages to stable release.
That would be quite complex, but doable. This way, people could use e17,
but only if they run cauldron. Thus, we are free of any
support/stability requirement.

3) We could ship the stable part ( ie, those with a tarball like eina,
etc ) and provide a script to compile/install the missing part from
svn, since this would also free use from support/stability requirement,
and as a bonus, let anybody keep the newest version ( because again, I
doubt that e17 developpers are interested into getting old bug reports,
given past and current interactions ). Of course, we should warn people
upon installation that they are on their own, that their e17 will be
updated often ( for the same reason about developpers )
. And of course, this assume that no updated tarball are needed for the
stable part.

There is several way, and that's just the ones I can think in 5 minutes.

But e17 is a package that we always drop sooner or later, and once in a
while, discovered again, and then dropped again.
-- 
Michael Scherer