[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Mon Nov 29 17:02:36 CET 2010

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
+
+> 
+> Indeed, however it helps showing that there's a set of packages which is supported, and another one which is only on behalf of the maintainer. In a community driven distribution, this distinction may remains valid : some packages are officially supported by the distribution, others may or may not be, depending on the maintainer (or lack of maintainer).
+
+We don't need separate medias to show that there are two sets of
+packages, supported and unsupported. I think using separate medias adds
+useless complexity. We could for instance provide a file on api.mageia.org
+containing the list of officially supported packages. It would also have
+other advantages :
+ - You can see how many unsupported packages and which ones are installed
+   on your system. This is not possible with main/contrib, if you enabled
+   contrib temporarly to install a few packages.
+ - You can change the package status (supported/unsupported) after the
+   release, if needed.
+ - Some packages can have a different support time. On Mandriva, "Base
+   system & components" was supported longer, but it was not clear which
+   packages were part of this.
+ - This file could also list known security issues for unsupported
+   and supported packages.
+ - Some packages have a lot of optional plugins, and we build them all,
+   adding a lot of build requires. With main/contrib separation we need
+   to add all the build dependencies to main, even if most of them are
+   not runtime dependencies.
+
+