Am including Factory list, perhaps in 11.3 a better way of making source available to end users, which avoids big load on Build Service and Mirrors is possible?
On project list, a request was made for source by someone unfamiliar with openSUSE suggested an ISO; installing source rpm's with YaST is not working as it did in past for me, because only binary packages are held on most of the download.opensuse.org mirrors.
2009/12/4 Peter Pöml poeml@cmdline.net:
Am 04.12.2009 um 09:56 schrieb Karsten König:
All of that is not doable via offering source rpms, so, maybe we can get rid of src rpms at all later ...
Currently osc/obs webfrontend is for novell accounts only, and also a seperate tool if one wants to really see the history of the package (osc)
I agree, that's really bad.
So the srpms fill an important niche, people from upstream projects getting bugreports can simply go ahead, download the source rpm and check the .spec file for obvious mistakes in the building process and/or check the patches applied.
Before dumping source rpms for saving space, which is somewhat questionable looking at the huge space and traffic the home: repositories generate, people need an anonymous read access, I don't think any other distribution forces something like this on external people.
Source RPMs have a special drawback in the build service: they are published as many times as there are build targets, with slight variations only. See http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2009-06/msg00169.html
Well, that's were 30-50% of the build service disk space goes!
This is a similar percentage of space as the home: namespace. It is significant :-)
Excluding build service source RPMs from mirroring is an important instrument to find fmirrors at all.
So problems are :
1) source rpm's are changed and re-published over frequently by Build service
2) source rpm take huge diskspace and bandwidth, for something rarely required on installed system
3) obtaining the source to build and modify a package on end-user system (as required by GPL) is less obvious than it was in past
Can we simply have seperate hosts in URI's for binary download, binary debug & source packages?
What about a way to install all the source of used packages? Obtaining all the project source is handled by snail mail request for a (possibly chargeable) DVD.
Rob