Op zondag 28 november 2010 18:50:28 schreef Michael scherer: > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 11:16:57PM +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote: > > Op zaterdag 27 november 2010 22:07:43 schreef Michael scherer: > > > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 08:23:59PM +0200, Thomas Backlund wrote: > > > > Jerome Quelin skrev 27.11.2010 19:11: > > > > >On 10/11/27 17:59 +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote: > > > > >and, more importantly: what is the advantage? that is, what does > > > > >that bring you, except more admin? > > > > > > > > QA! > > > > and enduser satisfaction. > > > > > > > > Just take a look on many bugreports in MDV Bugzilla. > > > > If the report is against a nomaintainer@ package, currently Triage > > > > pretty much only can state "thanks for your report, but since it has > > > > no maintainer, nothing will probably happend" wich is not good answer > > > > for a person that have taken the time to report a bug. > > > > > > Then why don't we either : > > > - decide that non maintened package must be taken care by trainee, as > > > part of the training > > > - decide to clean them. > > > > that's a great idea, we need more trainees! but of course, we can't do > > that with all 5000+ unmaintained packages... > > > > is there a way to get rpm usage stats from those unmaintained packages. > > No. We can only get download stats from mirrors. While it may be biased > toward some geographical preference ( ie, I doubt many people download > locale-zh from distrib-coffee ), it can give at least some ideas. Nothing > precise, but still better than random. > > > > > By having the /extra/ disabled by default, and a popup notifying the > > > > user if he enables it that the packages are "unmaintained" he knows > > > > he's "on his own" > > > > > > That's already what the GPL say, basically :) > > > ( you have no garantee of anything ). > > > > > > Yet, I fail to see what benefit it does really bring to users. Most of > > > them will enable the media ( because some people enable everything ), > > > will forget the message ( because we always forget popup, thanks > > > to endless abuse of such popup ), > > > and the only benefit is that we could tell "we told you". Not really > > > satisfying, and if I was a user, it would not really please me, nor > > > inspire confidence. > > > > some would, but that they'd also enable testing, backports, debug, etc... > > if they really do so, it's kind of their own fault. i don't think the > > majority does that. the majority leaves it at default. > > And so the majority will say "$distro is bad because there is not enough > software".
i think for most people what we have is enough, sometimes too much choice is bad too. however, when a search doesn't give anything, it can search some of the disabled sections; that would alleviate this problem. > > The thing is that you have no guarantee, but the thing is, with mdv, > > there's too much packages that just don't work; you install it, you > > click in the menu and nothing happens because it doesn't work. > > So too much is 10%, more ? > > > same thing and one of them is in extra; then i get only one, if i can't > > find any, i can enable the searching in extra and try to find a package > > that works. > > > > that's why i personally would prefer to leave these off by default. > > > > > We could avoid adding a media by merging this media with core, > > > and show the popup when a user install a package without maintainer, > > > telling either "beware, this package is currently marked as not > > > maintained, and may be buggy. We will try to do what we can to help in > > > this case, but no one is officialy in charge" or "we are seeking help > > > on taking care of this package, if you use it often, please register > > > on $URL" > > > > this popup will get ignored too; and persons who are perfectly aware of > > it, will grow irritated. > > Then, we can do a single "do not ask me again", or just show it once ? > > > futhermore: (no separate extra) > > > > - huge amount of packages (think of the mirrors) > > mirror space is taken with extra or core. So the argument do not stand > much. Now, this would be a arguent for simply erasing those unmaintained > packages. well, indeed, except that i'm kind of against that; and would prefer mirrors with storage issues to just NOT include 'extra'. after all, the mirrorlist could just get them from another mirror. > > - huge hdlists > > Indeed. But if we want to have people be able to search > inside like you said you would, this would still be downloaded, be used ( > so in memory ) and on the mirror. So that's also not much a good reason. > ( however, if we remove them... ) you do have a point here; except that this also goes with updating; since extra is unmaintained, fetching newer versions will likely have less impact.