Le 2010-10-01 06:38, Fabrice Facorat a écrit :
I've been following closely all the Mandriva vs Mageia story. I found
it unfortunate that we have to come to this way, but I guess there's a
serious fracture between Mandriva and part of its community. We have
no choice except to cope with this and try to do our best to allow
this unfortunate situation to found a sensible solution in the future.
As we know, one of the Mandriva strenght are the Mandriva tools,
however Mandriva tools have some issues :
- they are written in perl. Sorry for perl dev, but I do still think
that perl is harder to understand than C-like based syntax langages.
However we must admit that we are not going to rewrite all the
Mandriva tools ;-) However better documentation ( PerlDoc tags ) could
help a little.
- Mandriva tools are not used by others distributions ( except
PCLinuxOS, United Linux, and ... Mageia ) and so have few external
contributions : They notably lack visibility.
I do think also that Mandriva will have to use its ressources in an
efficient way.
Here aree my proposals, feel free to discuss :
1. host Mandriva tools on github or code.google.com. This will ease
fork maintenance and tracking, to contribute back ( without having to
have a Mandriva account )
2. Make some decisions about the tools we should keep, and the ones we
should ... trash. For example we did replace printerdrake with
system-config-printer ( python ), and msec have been rewritten (
python ). Whereas I do think that system-config-printer is way buggier
than printerdrake, I guess that at some points, we will have to do
this more and more : replace some Mandriva tools with for example some
Fedora ones. Please note however that this bring its own issues :
python vs perl, and the integration with the rest of Mandriva
infrastructure
3. A decision will have to be made concerning net_applet and NetworkManager
4. Whereas I do love rpmdrake, I do think also that something will
have to be done about it as its UI is clearly outdated and not on par
with the competition :
- Ubuntu software center :
http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2010/09/software-center-with-a-dose-of-zeitgeist-and-maybe-teamgeist/
, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Software_Center ,
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter
- iTunes App Store :
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_to_download_iphone_apps_from_apple_itunes_store.html
,
http://cybernetnews.com/download-iphone-firmware-20-itunes-77-app-store-and-more/
- Interesting discussion about PackageKit direction :
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/a-story-about-updates-and-people/
So we may have to completely rewrite rpmdrake UI or switch to
packagekit with and urpmi backend.
5. Junior tasks contributions. I noticed while visiting the
LibreOffice website. They have junior task for people willing to
contribute to the codebase, and most of theses junior tasks consist to
improve code clarity, fix comments. I guess that the same thing could
be done with Mandriva tools, notably adding perldoc tags/comments.
Last but not least, I know that on Mageia ML, there was a discussion
about the people we should target. Here are some interesting
reflexions :
Sweet Caroline : http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/sweet-caroline/
fedoraproject.org redesign update :
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/fedoraproject-org-redesign-update/
You must be this tall to ride: __ :
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride-__/
Thanks for your observations Fabrice.
Just speaking from the "user" point of view. Let us not lose sight that
one of the strong points of Mandriva/Mageia is the use of the MCC.
Having all the controls under one title and well integrated is what
really distinguishes Mandriva from the other distros. Practically in all
of the news items that I have read of Mandriva, they mention the
powerful tools at the users' disposal to help in configure/maintain the
Mandriva distro, and this type of comment has been going on for years.
I hope that Mageia would not stray from this tool. Whichever way the
devs decide to programme the tools from the back-en does not matter to
the user. How easily it is to configure/maintain the distro is what
counts to the user and it is quite a strong selling point.
When I help out people with their Mandriva setup and I tell them to go
to their MCC (if they are not familiar with it, I usually say "You know,
the blue sceen and red wrench thingy at the bottom of your monitor.",
they are confortable in using it.
The only thing that I find lacking for the MCC is the lack of immediate
help. If a user has never used a section of MCC, they will normally
abandon the use of that section. But if there were a help button that
would explain, in a graphic way (either video or by slide show) the use
of that section, then that would go a long way in helping out.
I sincerely hope that the MCC (Mageia Contol Centre) will not be abandoned.
Marc
