Tux99 a écrit :
Quote: Ahmad Samir wrote on Thu, 14 October 2010 16:00
I've seen, too many times, trigger-happy packagers backporting
packages that're not maintained by them (so they know it less than
those package maintainer(s)), breaking those packages and annoying the
maintainers of said packages. It's usually irresponsible to backport a
package without taking that package maintainer's opinion into account.
(an infamous example on that is gwibber being backported to 2010.1).
I agree it should be preferably the maintainer doing the backport, or he
should at least be consulted.
I think that should be an explicit policy of Mageia.
New users who frequented the forums always got to know what backports
are pretty fast. And bugzilla is the perfect system for asking for a
backport, that worked pretty good.
The wast majority of 'normal' users never uses the forum.
Backports shouldn't be something that only users who frequent the forum
find out about.
True. Although I suspect that they are more likely to use the forum
than formally make a bug report.
That's they way backports has always worked, no specific patches, just
the latest cooker package pushed to backports "as is with no official
support", that's reasonable, packagers shouldn't promise to support
backports when they can't due to various reasons (time, effort.. etc).
But IMHO that should change in Mageia, we should promise support by the way
of timely updates, especially when security issues are present.
That can only change if we have more ressources. At least at first, we
risk to have somewhat less, without the financial input from the
commercial side that exists for Mandriva.
Backports shouldn't be second choice, it should be the default,
since that
would make Mageia stand out from other distros as being the distro
were
users get the latest versions of apps before any other major
distro
provides them.
Enabling them by default defies the purpose of having backports at
all; it's not for new users, it's more for slightly experienced users
or power users who want the latest versions of apps.
Agreed.
That's exactly the crucial bit that IMHO needs to change, backports are
very interesting for 'normal' users so we should make sure normal users
can use them.
Don't you see how attractive it is especially for 'normal' users to have
access to the latest versions all the time?
I would expect that 'normal' users would be most concerned that the
system just work.
The 'latest versions' is more a preoccupation of a minority of at least
moderately experienced users, who probably also like trying out all
sorts of new software.
Not at all typical of the population in general, but admittedly more
common among Linux users.
Sure, not everyone wants them, but by integrating the skip.list in the
update GUI we could keep 'conservative' users happy too
That would certainly help, and not just for 'conservative' users. Often
a particular package only has problems on some systems. A more readily
accessible skip.list blacklist would make it easier to avoid accidently
re-installing a package that didn't work as expected the first time, for
whatever reason.
- André (andre999)
