Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (475 mails)

[Andrew Wafaa <awafaa@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:54:00 +0300
"Alexey Eremenko" <al4321@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I BETA-test openSUSE distro since 10.0, wrote openSUSE documentation
> (Lessons for Lizard), and built few RPMs.
> Additionally I donate $ each month to different OSS projects and
> beta-test different OSS applications.
>
> Now I'm thinking of way to build _big_ repository, which will contain
> lots of packages that openSUSE Factory lacks.
>
> Current model of third-party packages for openSUSE is broken in my
> opinion. There are lots of packages across hundreds of Build Service
> projects, which is hard to download & navigate.
> It is bad idea for deployment - it is only good for
> experimentation/development.
>
> I have few possible ideas here:
> 1. Convince community to integrate stable third-party packages into
> openSUSE Factory
> 2. Convince community to make a big, united third-party repository
> 3. Build third-party repo myself in openSUSE build service
> 4. Build third-party repo myself in private server
>
> I really believe that #1 is best idea, but due to opposition I don't
> know. Perhaps I will need to evaluate other options.

By this I take it you mean something similar to Ubuntu's Universe repo
or whatever it is?  IMHO I'm not a great fan of the idea.  Why? Well
sometimes I may just want one package and having the multitude of
packages that are contained within most likely will lead to conflicts.

I already encounter such issues with a few packages from the Packman
repos.  Thankfully they are few and far between.

> Back to the question:
> > How do you want to contribute?
> I want to test & maintain third-part packages, that go into openSUSE
> Factory.
>
> NOTE: I can maintain packages stability wise, but not security wise.
> (I'm not security expert)
> So for security-related updates, we will need to figure out how is it
> possible to provide this for third-party/community packages.

A good way of doing this is either through the BuildService or indeed
joining the Packman team. There are already multiple Community repos
available in the BS, GNOME/KDE/XFCE/Mono. They do a very good job of
hosting the 3rd party apps no in the main distro.  

There are very strict requirements on a package making it into the
distro, once in a release there is a version freeze maintainability for
the lifespan of the distro etc.  Unless you can fulfil *ALL* the
criteria then you won't get anything in.  If openSUSE were to relax on
those requirements then it would lead to a shoddy distro and open the
door to a lot of complaints (rightly so).  The community repos are not
so strict on the requirements.

I would recommend you try and help out with one or more of these repos,
they are available by default in the Community Repository list from
YaST.  So any contribution you make will be made available almost out
of the box ;-)

Regards,

Andy

-- 
Andrew Wafaa, openSUSE Member: GNOME & Marketing Teams.
http://opensuse.org/GNOME | http://en.opensuse.org/Marketing_Team
openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org
awafaa@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wafaa.eu | http://www.forcev.net
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