[Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?

Thu Oct 14 16:00:50 CEST 2010

On 14 October 2010 15:41, Tux99 <tux99-mga at uridium.org> wrote:
+>
+>
+> Quote: Buchan Milne wrote on Thu, 14 October 2010 15:27
+>
+>> What aspects of the Mandriva backports solution are not satisfactory?
+>>
+>> -The fact that not everything is available as a backport?
+>
+> Yes, more packages should be available
+> (and as future packager I will do my part to make that happen)
+
+Well, backporting a package is a one-liner, so it takes less than
+minute to be done; that's not the issue. The issue is that a new
+version of package A may need a new version or package B to work, so
+package B needs to be backported too; and/or that the new version of A
+doesn't work with older libs/kernels, so backporting isn't too much
+time consuming for packagers, but making sure that that backport has a
+good chance of working(tm) is the bigger burden/responsibility.
+
+I've seen, too many times, trigger-happy packagers backporting
+packages that're not maintained by them (so they know it less than
+those package maintainer(s)), breaking those packages and annoying the
+maintainers of said packages. It's usually irresponsible to backport a
+package without taking that package maintainer's opinion into account.
+(an infamous example on that is gwibber being backported to 2010.1).
+
+>
+>> -That users don't know how to request a backport?
+>
+> It certainly could help publicizing backports and giving the user an easy
+> way to request specific packages
+
+New users who frequented the forums always got to know what backports
+are pretty fast. And bugzilla is the perfect system for asking for a
+backport, that worked pretty good.
+
+[...]
+
+>> -That users aren't aware of backports?
+>
+> Yes, backports should be promoted better in drakrpm and in the web site.
+>
+>> -Something else?
+>
+> backports should be supported for security patches and bug fixes just like
+> the main packages (if not instead of the main packages).
+> Of course the security patch could be simply provided by backporting a
+> newer version of the package, no need to make patches for each version.
+>
+
+That's they way backports has always worked, no specific patches, just
+the latest cooker package pushed to backports "as is with no official
+support", that's reasonable, packagers shouldn't promise to support
+backports when they can't due to various reasons (time, effort.. etc).
+
+>> > The end users need to do less than now for to get new versions of
+>> > their
+>> > favourites applications.
+>>
+>> Less than 'urpmi --searchmedia Backports chromium' ?
+>
+> CLI is not ideal for 'normal' users.
+>
+
+rpmdrake has a "Backports" filter that shows packages from backports
+repos, that's easy to use even for new users.
+
+>> Or, should it be more obvious in rpmdrake or similar?
+>
+> I think they should be enabled by default, since it's my impression that
+> the majority of 'normal' users wants new versions of apps, those users who
+> DON'T want them can still always disable them.
+>
+> Backports shouldn't be second choice, it should be the default, since that
+> would make Mageia stand out from other distros as being the distro were
+> users get the latest versions of apps before any other major distro
+> provides them.
+>
+
+Enabling them by default defies the purpose of having backports at
+all; it's not for new users, it's more for slightly experienced users
+or power users who want the latest versions of apps.
+
+-- 
+Ahmad Samir
+