[Mageia-dev] About Mandriva tools future : Host Mandriva tools on github

Fri Oct 1 12:38:31 CEST 2010

I've been following closely all the Mandriva vs Mageia story. I found
+it unfortunate that we have to come to this way, but I guess there's a
+serious fracture between Mandriva and part of its community. We have
+no choice except to cope with this and try to do our best to allow
+this unfortunate situation to found a sensible solution in the future.
+
+As we know, one of the Mandriva strenght are the Mandriva tools,
+however Mandriva tools have some issues :
+- they are written in perl. Sorry for perl dev, but I do still think
+that perl is harder to understand than C-like based syntax langages.
+However we must admit that we are not going to rewrite all the
+Mandriva tools ;-) However better documentation ( PerlDoc tags ) could
+help a little.
+
+- Mandriva tools are not used by others distributions ( except
+PCLinuxOS, United Linux, and ... Mageia ) and so have few external
+contributions : They notably lack visibility.
+
+I do think also that Mandriva will have to use its ressources in an
+efficient way.
+
+Here aree my proposals, feel free to discuss :
+
+1. host Mandriva tools on github or code.google.com. This will ease
+fork maintenance and tracking, to contribute back ( without having to
+have a Mandriva account )
+
+2. Make some decisions about the tools we should keep, and the ones we
+should ... trash. For example we did replace printerdrake with
+system-config-printer ( python ), and msec have been rewritten (
+python ). Whereas I do think that system-config-printer is way buggier
+than printerdrake, I guess that at some points, we will have to do
+this more and more : replace some Mandriva tools with for example some
+Fedora ones. Please note however that this bring its own issues :
+python vs perl, and the integration with the rest of Mandriva
+infrastructure
+
+3. A decision will have to be made concerning net_applet and NetworkManager
+
+4. Whereas I do love rpmdrake, I do think also that something will
+have to be done about it as its UI is clearly outdated and not on par
+with the competition :
+- Ubuntu software center :
+http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2010/09/software-center-with-a-dose-of-zeitgeist-and-maybe-teamgeist/
+, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Software_Center ,
+https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter
+- iTunes App Store :
+http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_to_download_iphone_apps_from_apple_itunes_store.html
+, http://cybernetnews.com/download-iphone-firmware-20-itunes-77-app-store-and-more/
+- Interesting discussion about PackageKit direction :
+http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/a-story-about-updates-and-people/
+
+So we may have to completely rewrite rpmdrake UI or switch to
+packagekit with and urpmi backend.
+
+5. Junior tasks contributions. I noticed while visiting the
+LibreOffice website. They have junior task for people willing to
+contribute to the codebase, and most of theses junior tasks consist to
+improve code clarity, fix comments. I guess that the same thing could
+be done with Mandriva tools, notably adding perldoc tags/comments.
+
+Last but not least, I know that on Mageia ML, there was a discussion
+about the people we should target. Here are some interesting
+reflexions :
+Sweet Caroline : http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/sweet-caroline/
+fedoraproject.org redesign update :
+http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/fedoraproject-org-redesign-update/
+You must be this tall to ride: __ :
+http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride-__/
+
+
+-- 
+Close the World, Open the Net
+http://www.linux-wizard.net
+