[Mageia-dev] E17 packaging

Thu Oct 27 17:10:40 CEST 2011

Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 à 23:12 +0200, Florian Hubold a écrit :
+> Am 26.10.2011 22:06, schrieb Michael Scherer:
+> > Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 à 18:58 +0200, Florian Hubold a écrit :
+> >
+> >> If keeping old releases unchanged from distro to distro version is
+> >> your vision of improving quality and more satisfying for our end-users,
+> >> that's not my vision, sorry.
+> > Then we should simply remove e17 altogether. Because, by choice of the
+> > developpers, it is not stable enough to be packaged.
+> >
+> Yes, altogether that would be a logical conclusion, sadly but true.
+> Seems some maintainers can actually be worse than infamous 'nobody'.
+> 
+> How to deal with that on the upgrade to mga2 in packaging terms,
+> display a message to E17 users to the extent of:
+> 
+>     "... e17 has been removed to improve on mageia overall quality,
+>     please use another window manager / desktop environment ... "
+> 
+> 
+> And please: this is meant as a serious question following the
+> above conclusion ...
+
+That's a good question but in fact, the situation is not really new.
+That's already something we should do for any software dropped. 
+
+Either we drop because something do not work anymore ( for example,
+something unmaintained upstream, not rebuildable and no one able to fix
+), or we drop because we replace.
+
+Replacing is seamless and we do it quite often, dropping is not. 
+
+I would propose that we add a conflict on mageia-release, and make a
+note in release notes. So on upgrade, package is removed, and people
+have documentation.
+
+
+Now, for the other problem of providing e17 without bypassing all our
+update procedure, there is several possible solutions :
+
+1) We could move that to another repository, outside of Mageia, with
+different rules until that's sutable to be integrated properly. 3rd
+parties repos are bad IMHO, but if people do not want to follow the
+policy for whatever reasons, that's unavoidable. 
+
+2) We could find a way to not place some packages to stable release.
+That would be quite complex, but doable. This way, people could use e17,
+but only if they run cauldron. Thus, we are free of any
+support/stability requirement.
+
+3) We could ship the stable part ( ie, those with a tarball like eina,
+etc ) and provide a script to compile/install the missing part from
+svn, since this would also free use from support/stability requirement,
+and as a bonus, let anybody keep the newest version ( because again, I
+doubt that e17 developpers are interested into getting old bug reports,
+given past and current interactions ). Of course, we should warn people
+upon installation that they are on their own, that their e17 will be
+updated often ( for the same reason about developpers )
+. And of course, this assume that no updated tarball are needed for the
+stable part.
+
+There is several way, and that's just the ones I can think in 5 minutes.
+
+But e17 is a package that we always drop sooner or later, and once in a
+while, discovered again, and then dropped again.
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+