nicolas vigier a écrit :
On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, andre999 wrote:
The idea is not that the Mageia community would not support "extra"
packages.
It is just that if an "extra" package breaks, it shouldn't break a user's
system.
But if a "core" package breaks, we would expect that it would break many
users' systems.
Thus the priority to ensure that "core" packages are always fixed in a
timely manner.
I don't think we need repositories to define bug priorities. If a
package break the system, the bug report should mention it. And we can
also have minor bugs in "core" packages not breaking anything. Should
we fix them in a timely manner, before any critical bug on "extra"
packages breaking useful applications ?
I agree that minor bugs in core need not have absolute priority.
But from what I see, few bug reports mention that something "breaks the
system".
They focus on the issue in question, to varying degrees of success.
(Reminds me of end-user support. Much of the time they don't recognize
the real problem.)
My point is, significant bugs in core packages should be fixed in a
timely manner, as much as possible. And indeed, critical bugs should be
fixed. But if a critical bug affects a non-core package, it is likely
to affect only that package. Not so a core bug.
By core, I mean in the logical sense.
If that can be done effectively and efficiently with a set of "core"
repositories, so be it.
However I don't see such a solution.
I would very much prefer to continue with the present separation until
such a solution, if any, is found.
And the cost of separate "core" and "extra" repositories is minimal,
assuming that core packages are officially supported. And separate
repositories do provide benefits to end-users, as well.
- Some packages can have a different support time. On Mandriva, "Base
system& components" was supported longer, but it was not clear which
packages were part of this.
Core is proposed to be largely "base system& components". Part of the
idea is to make clearer, to everyone, which packages have an enhanced level
of support.
Support time is another (useful) question.
Why do we need two repositories for that ?
Sandbox.
It is clearer to everyone.
The fact that Mandriva didn't control what went into main is a large
part of their problem.
If you can find another solution, just as reliable, great.
But I suspect it would be more complex, and probably cost more in
resources as well.
The cost of extra repositories is almost nil - if we assume that we want
to rigorously control what is to be fully supported, and apply it.
- Some packages have a lot of optional plugins, and we build them all,
adding a lot of build requires. With main/contrib separation we need
to add all the build dependencies to main, even if most of them are
not runtime dependencies.
We will have to be more selective for core packages, to avoid this problem.
Maybe "suggests", or other features being added with rpm5.
Suggests on BuildRequires does not exists. And we need them to be
installed for the build.
If a core package has real buildrequires, then these requires should be
in core.
If only a non-core package has buildrequires, these requires need not
necessarily be in core.
Although packages like cmake should probably be in core anyway, as they
are very likely to be used to build packages.
I don't know details for rpm5, but it could have the equivalent of
suggests for buildrequires. (Like an alternate list of tools required ?)
Alternately, maybe some modification will have to be done to the spec files.
Since Mandriva is going through a very similar process, we could
probably share much of the changes required.
By the way, for the conversion to Mageia, I would suggest assuming that
all of main + contrib is in extra, and moving those to core which meet
our criteria.
Much of main will be very quickly moved, such as base Linux/Gnu
packages, drak* tools, etc.
And selected applications like Go-oo/LibreOffice and Firefox.
We will first have to detail our criteria, of course.
another 2 cents :)
- André
