Hi, As one of the people who does maintain Contrib, I'll add my comments inline, On 3/1/11 2:01 PM, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:
Hi,
I think I'm not the only one who is confused about today's status of Contrib. This project probably needs some respecification because policies around the openSUSE project changed since Contrib was started.
Agreed.
The Factory distribution is pretty open nowadays and I hear a lot of people saying that Contrib is not needed anymore and everything useful should enter Factory but I'm not sure if that makes sense or can work out at all. There are different types of packages in Contrib currently, including - packages dropped from Factory because security maintenance is very hard (e.g. some php apps)
These should be moved to the server:php repos IMO.
- packages dropped from Factory because they are outdated immediately and nobody likes to use them for two years from $DIST - packages dropped from Factory just because they haven't been touched upstream for years (but are still doing their job well) (e.g. abook)
I would like to hear from Factory maintainers what their thoughts are about the above types of packages. Probably nothing changed here and therefore the statement "everything should enter Factory" is not realistic?
Yes. Some of the packagers do not want to maintain them in Factory for whatever reasons: not wanting a version freeze imposed etc.
Given that (please correct me if I'm wrong) I still see a need for something like Contrib. I would change its policy though and wouldn't freeze versions hard for released distributions. More like the backport repositories or packman would probably make sense. If you now say that is what backport repos are for, I would answer that having 20 backport repos is a nightmare and also it should be possible to stay on a version if there is no real need to update to a newer one. Contrib maintainers should be rather free to decide if a version update is done or not.
What do others think?
Wolfgang
Well, I think we could the following: Make the repo an area where version freezes are not imposed, at least for leaf packages. As for the new packages, I have concentrated on getting the submitters to get the package quality comparable to Factory. No doubt it needs to evolve, but there is definitely a use for this kind of repo. My 0.02 Cheers, Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org