[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Mon Nov 29 13:14:08 CET 2010

+Le lundi 29 novembre 2010 12:46:22, andre999 a écrit :
+> As already commented in previous posts, I would rather see this split 
+> into 2 parts :
+> 1) core = really core (or very useful) to a fully functional desktop or 
+> server or developer system.
+> Examples include packages for the kernel, usual Linux utilities and 
+> development tools, drivers, drak* and associated tools, complete desktop 
+> environments (such as Gnome, KDE, LXDE), and common applications such as 
+> LibreOffice (successor to Go-Openoffice) and Firefox.
+> 
+>   This would essentially be a subset (most) of Mandriva main, with 
+> possibly some from Mandriva contrib.  These packages may not depend on 
+> packages in extra.
+>   Every effort must be collectively made to ensure that packages in this 
+> group are maintained.
+> 
+> and
+> 
+> 2) extra = supplementary packages which, if they break, will not affect 
+> core.
+>   This is essentially all (or least all maintained) of Mandriva contrib 
+> and much of Mandriva main.
+> Typical examples include calendar printing programs, poedit (for 
+> translators), and games.
+> 
+> Extra would probably be much larger than main.  (After eliminating 
+> non-functional non-maintained packages.)
+
+I agree with andre999 on this point : the "everything in core" approach makes no distinction between packages which I can trust (for servers for example) and packages which I can't rely on.
+
+It was said early that you just have to look at whether the package has a maintainer or not to make a distinction, but this is not sufficient. A maintainer can be very active in cauldron but not care about maintaining for stable releases. A package can have no maintainer but be actively supported in practice (by everybody in cauldron, by security team in stable releases).
+
+The current main vs contrib approach in mandriva is very sensible. It has some (minor, to me) drawbacks, but when I install packages from main I *know* there will be security updates, bugfix updates, and a QA process that packages in contrib don't have. Do we plan to have no QA process at all in Mageia ? If we plan to have such processes, does the merge between core and extra make is efficient ? I guess we don't plan to have all packages (even maintained ones) equally supported with a full QA process (doesn't seem realistic) ?
+
+If we define collectively what "core" contains, then we can ensure that every package there has :
+- a maintainer who takes care of it in cauldron
+- a maintainer who takes care of security and bugfix updates in stable release (maybe the same person, maybe not) 
+- (when doable) a maintainer who takes care of backports for this package (maybe the same person, maybe not) 
+- a QA team which will review changes on stable releases for these packages
+
+Packages in core get the "QA approved" stamp whereas packages in extra get none.
+
+Therefore I'm against the merge of core and extra.
+
+Regards
+
+Samuel Verschelde
+
+