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

Thu Oct 21 04:48:06 CEST 2010

Tux99 a écrit :
+>
+>
+> Quote: Ahmad Samir wrote on Thu, 14 October 2010 16:00
+>    
+>> 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).
+>>      
+> I agree it should be preferably the maintainer doing the backport, or he
+> should at least be consulted.
+>    
+I think that should be an explicit policy of Mageia.
+>
+>    
+>> 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.
+>>      
+> The wast majority of 'normal' users never uses the forum.
+> Backports shouldn't be something that only users who frequent the forum
+> find out about.
+>    
+True.  Although I suspect that they are more likely to use the forum 
+than formally make a bug report.
+>> 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).
+>>      
+> But IMHO that should change in Mageia, we should promise support by the way
+> of timely updates, especially when security issues are present.
+>    
+That can only change if we have more ressources.  At least at first, we 
+risk to have somewhat less, without the  financial input from the 
+commercial side that exists for Mandriva.
+>>> 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.
+>>      
+Agreed.
+> That's exactly the crucial bit that IMHO needs to change, backports are
+> very interesting for 'normal' users so we should make sure normal users
+> can use them.
+> Don't you see how attractive it is especially for 'normal' users to have
+> access to the latest versions all the time?
+>    
+I would expect that 'normal' users would be most concerned that the 
+system just work.
+The 'latest versions' is more a preoccupation of a minority of at least 
+moderately experienced users, who probably also like trying out all 
+sorts of new software.
+Not at all typical of the population in general, but admittedly more 
+common among Linux users.
+
+> Sure, not everyone wants them, but by integrating the skip.list in the
+> update GUI we could keep 'conservative' users happy too
+That would certainly help, and not just for 'conservative' users.  Often 
+a particular package only has problems on some systems.  A more readily 
+accessible skip.list blacklist would make it easier to avoid accidently 
+re-installing a package that didn't work as expected the first time, for 
+whatever reason.
+
+- André (andre999)
+