On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 08:41:52AM +0200, Thomas Schmidt wrote: [ 8< ] superfluous fullquote pruned
I think our goal should be to empower users and expose the power of OBS (and the work the packages there do!) to them while of course protecting them/properly warning them when something goes wrong.
We have three 'levels of officialness' to packages. The packages build in home are usually for testing or private use. Note that sometimes they are meant to be widely used -some upstream projects use home projects to distribute their software, see quipzilla I recently blogged about [1]. So while we should warn users of the potential unstable and even dangerous nature of home projects, it should be not too hard to get there. Maybe a way of home projects to signify their goal ("just for my testing" vs "meant for general consumption") would be useful at some point.
Second level are the devel projects. Again, they can be meant for testing but often they are absolutely supposed to provide extra or more up to date software to end users. Examples are the GNOME and KDE extra and updated release repo's, the Games repo etcetera. Hiding them too much is absolutely bad: they are a major value of openSUSE.
Then we have of course our official, tested, released software. IF an user is searching for something, this should always be on top.
I propose to build up the UI to expose these three levels explicity, with the first two ALWAYS visible. Devel projects are a tad messy so for that we need to think of a way to expose them in a reasonable way.
What to show could be something like this:
Stable version [a] Testing version [b] devel project name (more testing packages) [c] (unofficial packages) [d]
It's not easy to detect the nature of a devel project. So I can't detect automatically if it's a playground or a reviewed extension to a distribution. Technically I was told that it's on the same level as home projects, because the commits don't get reviewed on checkin like it's done in the official distros and Factory.
I agree it would be nice to have a line 'devel release' which provides a newer version.
The information must be in the OBS. I once tried to push Samba from network:samba:TESTING and Coolo rejected it as it was not from the devel project. Cheers, Lars -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany