(warning, way too long email ahead) After many hours of work, Marc and I still identified a few issues with our safe repository transfer and delayed it (again) until Monday, as Marc is unavailable until then. State of the Uni^H^H^HPackman: - as announced, the old repositories (/suse/11.1, /suse/11.2, /suse/11.3) have been deleted - we created symbolic links to avoid breaking the old URLs: /suse/11.1 ---> /suse/Evergreen_11.1 /suse/11.2 ---> /suse/openSUSE_11.2 /suse/11.3 ---> /suse/openSUSE_11.3 /suse/11.4 ---> /suse/openSUSE_11.4 That means that unless you want to switch to the more fine-grained repositories (e.g. only Essentials + Multimedia), you don't have to change anything to your current URLs in zypp - the /suse/kde3 repository has been deleted and has not been replaced -- if there is a lot of demand for also having Packman built against e.g. 11.4 + K:D:F, then we might consider building that too, but our amount of build power might be too limited for that - the repository metadata and the packages are still signed with two different keys (as it was for the past year or two), which is highly annoying as that causes zypp not to automatically import the key -- we definitely want(ed) to fix that, but rpm utterly failed at re-signing the keys, will have to investigate - the website (http://packman.links2linux.org) might still have minor glitches here and there, we ran into a few "interesting" corner cases and a few ludicrous limitations of MySQL, but it should mostly be fine (openSUSE 11.4 doesn't show up yet, should be fixed in a couple of hours) - our OBS instance is still directly rsyncing into the public repository tree that is read by mirrors, which may cause incomplete or corrupt repositories to be synced to mirrors, specifically when a mirror server is pulling with rsync from the same directory our OBS is pushing into (but that only means that you might run into errors while trying to install packages, it does not endanger the security of the packages); that will be fixed by next week, hopefully, as Marc and I can continue to work on the process we designed for it -- if and when it happens, the repository is likely to be fixed with the next mirror pull, which is typically one hour later - the "community repositories" in YaST2 still point to the "big" repository, it's on my TODO to adapt it to the new layout (hence, it works, but doesn't offer the option of using the smaller "only-what-you-need" repositories) -- but I did add 11.4 already, not yet Tumbleweed and Evergreen_11.1 - the wiki pages on http://w.opensu.se/ are not up-to-date yet, will have to document the new layout - http://r.opensu.se is not updated yet either, on my TODO list - as said before, we now build Essentials for: * openSUSE 11.4 * openSUSE 11.3 * openSUSE 11.2 * Evergreen 11.1 (use that if you're still on 11.1) * Tumbleweed * Factory (snapshot) those are all published, on the mirrors, and can be used - the other repositories (Multimedia, Extra, Games) are currently only built for 11.2, 11.3 and 11.4 (the only reason being build power) - we still don't have a proper bug tracker, some other members of the Packman team still need to be convinced that it's useful and better suited than emails - the .repo files are there too now (maybe not on the mirrors yet, but that'd be only a matter of an hour for them to be synced); examples: * /suse/openSUSE_11.4/packman.repo * /suse/openSUSE_11.4/Essentials/packman-essentials.repo * /suse/openSUSE_11.4/Multimedia/packman-multimedia.repo etc... The latter means that for adding the "full" Packman repository for 11.4, this is what you need to do: zypper ar -r \ http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_11.4/packman.repo If you only want to add the Essentials and Multimedia repositories, do this: zypper ar -r \ http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_11.4/Essentials/packman-essentials.rep... zypper ar -r \ http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_11.4/Multimedia/packman-multimedia.rep... For a list of mirrors: http://packman.links2linux.org/MIRRORS.html (but don't use the one on skynet.be) Note that all the repositories depend on Essentials and, hence, if you add Multimedia, Extra or Games, you *must* also take care of adding Essentials. As there are no mechanisms to define dependencies between repositories, nothing will check that for you, you have to do it yourself. Obviously, if you use the "big" repository, you shouldn't add Essentials, as its packages are in the "big" metadata too. If you would like to contribute and help us, there are several options. THE TOP 10 THINGS TO DO TO HELP PACKMAN: (but in no particular order) ---------------------------------------- 1) If you have packaging experience, help us maintain our packages: we use our instance of the openSUSE Build Service so it's all business as usual (web UI, osc, SRs, ...). You can register a user at https://pmbs.links2linux.org/user/register_user and then poke me by email to confirm your account. Note that our OBS instance is *public*, which means that you can see all our packages, our spec files, etc... -- reviews and hints are always welcome, and it's even possible without an account on our OBS: http://pmbs.links2linux.org 2) If you have big iron servers idling around, we could use some more OBS workers, especially if users want us to build more combinations (e.g. Multimedia also for Evergreen and Tumbleweed, Essentials and Multimedia also against K:D:F, etc...). We use openVPN to interconnect our workers with our main OBS server. 3) If you have a bit of spare time on your hands, you could update the wiki pages about Packman and "restricted formats" at http://w.opensu.se -- if you don't have an account there yet, you may create an account here: http://w.opensu.se/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup and then poke me by email to confirm it 4) Same as above, that wiki has pretty much the same setup as the Mediawiki on opensuse.org and also supports *translations*. So if you want to help us translate those pages... see above ;) 5) If you run a mirror and would like to mirror Packman too, please let us know at packman@links2linux.de -- especially if the server is not in Europe (mirror coverage is not too shabby there). Note that the Packman repositories are pretty large though, and updated /very/ often. Oh, and they're being hammered by millions of openSUSE users too ;) Our current list of mirrors: http://packman.links2linux.org/MIRRORS.html (although the one on skynet.be is a dead cow, unfortunately, I need to remove it from that list) 6) Use and test our packages and when you run into issues, please let us know on packman@links2linux.de 7) Due to the migration of our packages, we didn't port everything (as explained in one of my previous posts) so if you notice a package you totally need which isn't in our repositories right now, please let us know at packman@links2linux.de (I hope you start to notice the pattern here.. ;)) 8) Please don't be mad at us if you report issues and they're not fixed in the next hour -- it sometimes even takes a few days, and poking us a few times can help too. We all do it during our spare time, after working on something more boring all day, and the ratio of packages to packagers is insane (see point 1 above ;)) 9) Please invent a time continuum distorter to give us 72 hours of free time a day. That would be awesome. 10) Have a lot of fun, because every 10 point list needs 10 points. Sorry for the inconveniences that might arise from the current situation (which will hopefully be fixed by Monday or Tuesday next week), but there are only so many hours in a day (err.. night) :\ Oh, and thanks for reading so far. I know, this email is way too long. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf