[Mageia-discuss] Easyurpmi forMageia ?

Sun May 22 01:56:41 CEST 2011

On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 04:59:43PM -0500, Dale Huckeby wrote:
+> On Sat, 21 May 2011, Ahmad Samir wrote:
+> 
+> >On 21 May 2011 21:46, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati
+> ><renaud at olgiati-in-paraguay.org> wrote:
+> >>Will there be some such thing in place when Mageia is finally launched ?
+> >>
+> >
+> >No, simply because there's no need for a tool like that; easyurpmi was
+> >mainly used by Mandriva users to add the PLF repos, in Mageia PLF is
+> >replaced by the Tainted repo, which is added (but disabled) by
+> >default.
+> 
+> Simply no need? Maybe I'm misreading you or missing something but this comes
+> across as really arrogant in presuming what others (not you!) do or don't need,
+> and how and why people have "mainly" used easyurpmi in the past. How do you
+> know? Was there a poll that I didn't get included in? I've always found
+> easyurpmi very convenient and not just for plf. I guess I didn't realize how
+> atypical I was.
+
+Easyurpmi, as I said in the past, suffer from various problems :
+
+- it is centralized. It is where people fighted to get included or not. Every 
+group in the past forked ( some without any attribution ) the software to be 
+listed as repository for their version, because the original maintainer refused
+to list every possible variations of every random rpm repositories. Despites having wrote
+docs on .urpmi-media file on the wiki, people prefered to reuse easyurpmi out of 
+some form of cargo culting ( until easyurpmi decided to adopt the system ).
+
+This caused some frictions in the community, and some divisions due to X instances of the software.
+
+- the code could have been much better. Olivier wrote it and he was not a php coder, and
+neither is Phillipe, the current maintainer. I think that the translation system is
+primitive and prone to problem. No one seemed to be motivated to rewrite, despites
+people fixing various problem.
+
+- the core of the system was still "here is a website that a new user cannot find by 
+itself, that will give command that he doesn't understand, and that he need to type as root,
+after asking question that didn't made much sense for him". That's bad on many levels :
+ - difficult to find for a new user.
+ - asking to type command as root first, and later "click on a link in your browser and type after your
+admin password", which is IMHO quite bad from giving wrong habits to people.
+ - asking lots of questions, ( fixed later by using a simplified mode, that use rpmdrake or 
+that fail silently )
+
+There is also some issue like "it requires a web browser" ( which is highly problematic when you 
+are in a datacenter, setting up a server ). And "it doesn't use ssl" ( which is rather bad for a site that give you
+basically software sources ). This one could be fixed, but that's quite curious that no one 
+thought of it before. Maybe people do not care about security, and about the content of a file that end
+to be read by a software running as root.
+
+The discoverability issues still exist and could not be fixed because of the nature of PLF/Mandriva.
+The bad habits given to users is a direct consequence of the way it work. The power struggle
+part too is inherent to the system, and this would become worst if there is a official instance 
+on Mageia servers.
+
+Since the discoverability issue should be fixed by simply having tainted disabled by default and maybe
+some popup whatever to enable it, I see no reason to suffer from the others problems (
+bad habits, power struggle ). People can install a clone of easyurpmi if they want, but I will 
+oppose on having it on our servers, on having anything like this labelled as official, and 
+would recommend to people to not deploy it.
+
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+