On Wed Oct 01, 2003 at 11:11:28PM +0200, Luca Berra wrote:

> >>However, i think we should make this distinction between contrib and club 
> >>disapear.
> >
> >Fine.  This is a starting point.  Now you need to think about what needs to
> >change.  There will always be a distinction.  Want to know what it is?
> >
> >contribs is parallel to cooker; it's development is done on cooker, for
> >cooker (or the next version)
> I am not that sure of this, there are packages on contrib that are made
> to be rebuilt on previous version of the distro.
> This is because some of the contributor actually use mandrake linux on
> production environments and some of them package things that they
> actually need.

Some, not all.  If packages were done to handle old versions while working
with the current, this would be a different story.  But this can be very
difficult...  I have some specs that can rebuild on older distribs and some
of them are *very* convoluted.  Take my qmail packages for example... before
my last rebuild, they would work all the way back to 7.2.  I stripped out
all of that because it was making the spec an absolute mess.

> >Club, on the other hand, does not do development for cooker.  It is 
> >packages
> >for stable versions.  Packages for Club are done for (now) 9.2, 9.1, 9.0,
> >etc.
> I don't believe there is anyone enjoying having to mantain 4 different
> packages of the same software when one would suffice.

Probably not.  But if you, as a contributor, have a cooker machine and
compile on cooker, how can you possibly know if your package, despite having
conditional build macros, will work with an older distrib if you don't take
the time to build and test on that old platform?  So you *do* need to
maintain it in such a manner otherwise you're just pumping out stuff that
pretends to work on old distribs and you really don't have a clue if it does
or not.

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