Michael Scherer a écrit :
Le jeudi 07 octobre 2010 à 11:14 -0400, Greg Harris a écrit :
I certainly agree, and mean no disrespect to you and other maintainers
who generously contribute their time and energy. But the Mandriva
implementation of backports is not a solution for those who want a
continuously updated distro. It works for me and I appreciate that it's
there. But if you are going to design a new and appealing alternative,
the effort required to make backports really known and useful needs to
be taken into account.
Well, that's a long running task. First, we have added meta data to
repository so we could design a better interface for the software ( ie,
how to detect that a packages is a backport and how to see a software is
a update, a test update, or something else ), then we need to implement
the soft, etc.
You spoke of having backport by default. We used to do it, but too much
people faced issue and complained. So we 1) said the truth, aka backport
didn't have the same rigorous testing 2) disabled it by default.
Now, if things change ( ie, if we have a process with more QA ), we can
change again.
Backports are definitely an area needing improvement. Firstly, it is a
bit awkward - especially with the waiting for Rpmdrake to process - to
temporarily access backports.
And when I have, most of the time what I was interested in was not as up
to date as the developper's site, if there was a backport for the
application (or type of application) in question.
Luckily, being a programmer, it is not problematic for me to compile and
create menu entries, etc, if necessary. But that doesn't help ordinary
users of (now) Mageia.
So I intend to become more involved with backports - and trying to
improve Rpmdrake and other tools.
(If only Perl were a little easier/ more like other languages, I would
have already done more.)
So Mageia is pushing me to contribute more actively - hopefully others
as well.
- André (andre999)
