Yum repros wanted

[Michael Schwendt]

Adam Gibson wrote:

> I know this has gone off topic a bit but thanks for the clarification. I 
> didn't realize that Extras would still accept updates to packages after 
> Fedora EOLs a distribution.

Among other things, we've been discussing the notion of
"distribution-specific package maintainers" a bit. It means that a
packager would not have to support legacy distributions and could
concentrate on the current and next release of Core, since any other
packager with interest in the legacy distributions could take over
maintainership of packages in the legacy branches of Extras CVS and do any
relevant updates. It would be like "you still use FC2 and you still use
package foo from Extras for FC, then you could keep foo up-to-date in
Extras if the primary package owner concentrates on newer releases and
maybe no longer has FC2 installed at all". It may also work just fine to
contribute via bugzilla and patches.

It cannot be generalised, though. For some types of packages, updates for
all supported distribution releases can be a trivial thing to do. For
other packages, distribution-specific testing and distribution-specific
build requirements and dependencies would require much more effort. Think
of backporting security fixes, because the most recent release of some
software would require newer build dependencies.

Then again, "if it ain't broke, don't update it" should be a good
guideline for legacy packages in Extras. I would expect users of legacy
Extras to submit bug reports for a) critical bugs and b) vulnerabilities
the packager possibly missed.

The main problem here really is that Extras packagers are volunteers.  If
it were project policy that every packager were required to support all of
his packages for probably four distribution releases instead of just the
non-legacy ones, that might be a turn-off criterion for many contributors.
You don't really want to spend any time on FC1 if the majority of Fedora
users seem to focus on FC3 and newer. In addition to that, packages in
Extras are built for three hardware architectures currently, while the
majority of packagers can only test on a single (or at most two)
architectures.

We've also found that an update release model of the form "if it cannot be
tested, just release it if it builds" would be an irresponsible thing to
do for updates for stable or legacy distributions. So, in the future, at
least the "testing" repository for Extras will come back to life. That
gives the user community a chance to contribute testing like it's done
with Fedora Core's Test Updates.

On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 09:54:37 -0400, Temlakos wrote:

> Well, let's give Extras the benefit of doubt. They've only been known as 
> "extras" since FC3, and they maintain separate directory structures for 
> both FC3 and FC4 RPM's. The real test will come when FC5 Test 1 or 2 
> comes out and FC3 goes Legacy. /Then/ we can watch and see what extras 
> does with its FC3 directories.

Sure. To be fair, however, the same applies to 3rd party repositories.
None of the 3rd party repositories guarantees that all packages for every
supported distribution release are up-to-date always. There are examples
of packages in 3rd party repositories, which have not been updated for
many months compared with Fedora Extras.

Anyway, if you discover packages in Extras, which should have been updated
some time ago already, please report it.

-- 
Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at users.sf.net>
Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz) - Linux 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
loadavg: 1.00 1.03 1.08