I think this whole question is not done with an easy answer. It can also not be ssen in a black/white mode. I see the clear insight of Michael's suggestion which is a black/white point of view. Not maintained? Kick it out (well, not "out" but into the ante-room). But I also see the reality from the user's POV. As for technical skilled or experienced users (including server admins) the main question is that those packages which are available should work and be maintained. Period. But there is also the vast group of the "unwashed masses" including those we want to attract to Mageia. Many of those do look at the sheer number of packages (like, "I'd rather switch to Foo Linux which offers 2 million packages while Mageia only offers 5,000"). Yes, I know, it's rather dumb and those users are the first to complain about some missing icon. But they are a large part of the users out there.
So we have to find a middle way between the pure and the ugly. How to find that, I don't know, this is far beyond my knowledge. I only wanted to comment on the "philosophical" side of the problem. For me as a mostly non-technical guy the best solution would be the "flag" solution. Forget the main/contrib split and just flag unmaintained rpms so that the user sees it in the GUI. How to accomplish that on the CLI with urpmi I don't know. Then people who are security- aware like server admins can easily avoid unmaintained packages or open a request in Bugzilla which **may** inspire somebody to pick up the poor unmaintained package. One comment on the mirror maintainer part of the story: I was mentioned by Michael several times as an example of a certain kind of mirror maintainers. Yes, ressources are tight but not that tight. As I understood the "official mirror" as suggested by Olivier was about to fill up to 700 GB during the next 3 years - given that we will have 2 releases per year. Most of the official mirrors of Mandriva do not provide 6 releases, moreso when the life cycle of a release is less than 2 years. So, a realistic size woul be more like 450-500 GB at the most which is easily done with today's hardware. This is not a problem. Time is not a problem either for such people like me. The only problem I still see from the mirror maintainer's side is the way to deal with "tainted" packages wrt the mirrorlist (as already mentioned). -- wobo
