[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Sun Nov 28 18:50:28 CET 2010

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 11:16:57PM +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote:
+> Op zaterdag 27 november 2010 22:07:43 schreef Michael scherer:
+> > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 08:23:59PM +0200, Thomas Backlund wrote:
+> > > Jerome Quelin skrev 27.11.2010 19:11:
+> > > >On 10/11/27 17:59 +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote:
+> > > >and, more importantly: what is the advantage? that is, what does that
+> > > >bring you, except more admin?
+> > > 
+> > > QA!
+> > > and enduser satisfaction.
+> > > 
+> > > Just take a look on many bugreports in MDV Bugzilla.
+> > > If the report is against a nomaintainer@ package, currently Triage
+> > > pretty much only can state "thanks for your report, but since it has
+> > > no maintainer, nothing will probably happend" wich is not good answer
+> > > for a person that have taken the time to report a bug.
+> > 
+> > Then why don't we either :
+> > - decide that non maintened package must be taken care by trainee, as
+> > part of the training
+> > - decide to clean them.
+> 
+> that's a great idea, we need more trainees! but of course, we can't do that 
+> with all 5000+ unmaintained packages...
+> 
+> is there a way to get rpm usage stats from those unmaintained packages.
+
+No. We can only get download stats from mirrors. While it may be biased toward 
+some geographical preference ( ie, I doubt many people download locale-zh 
+from distrib-coffee ), it can give at least some ideas. Nothing precise, but
+still better than random.
+
+> > > By having the /extra/ disabled by default, and a popup notifying the
+> > > user if he enables it that the packages are "unmaintained" he knows
+> > > he's "on his own"
+> > 
+> > That's already what the GPL say, basically :)
+> > ( you have no garantee of anything ).
+> > 
+> > Yet, I fail to see what benefit it does really bring to users. Most of them
+> > will enable the media ( because some people enable everything ), will
+> > forget the message ( because we always forget popup, thanks
+> > to endless abuse of such popup ),
+> > and the only benefit is that we could tell "we told you". Not really
+> > satisfying, and if I was a user, it would not really please me, nor
+> > inspire confidence.
+> 
+> some would, but that they'd also enable testing, backports, debug, etc... if 
+> they really do so, it's kind of their own fault. i don't think the majority 
+> does that. the majority leaves it at default.
+
+And so the majority will say "$distro is bad because there is not enough software".
+
+> The thing is that you have no guarantee, but the thing is, with mdv, there's 
+> too much packages that just don't work; you install it, you click in the menu 
+> and nothing happens because it doesn't work. 
+
+So too much is 10%, more ?
+
+> same thing and one of them is in extra; then i get only one, if i can't find 
+> any, i can enable the searching in extra and try to find a package that works.
+> 
+> that's why i personally would prefer to leave these off by default.
+>
+> > We could avoid adding a media by merging this media with core,
+> > and show the popup when a user install a package without maintainer,
+> > telling either "beware, this package is currently marked as not maintained,
+> > and may be buggy. We will try to do what we can to help in this case, but
+> > no one is officialy in charge" or "we are seeking help on taking care of
+> > this package, if you use it often, please register on $URL"
+> 
+> this popup will get ignored too; and persons who are perfectly aware of it, 
+> will grow irritated.
+
+Then, we can do a single "do not ask me again", or just show it once ?
+
+> 
+> futhermore: (no separate extra)
+>  - huge amount of packages (think of the mirrors)
+
+mirror space is taken with extra or core. So the argument do not stand much.
+Now, this would be a arguent for simply erasing those unmaintained packages.
+
+>  - huge hdlists
+
+Indeed. But if we want to have people be able to search
+inside like you said you would, this would still be downloaded, be used ( so in memory )
+and on the mirror. So that's also not much a good reason.
+( however, if we remove them... )
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+