On Wed Oct 01, 2003 at 04:33:08PM -0400, Austin wrote: > You are all missing the easiest solution: > --- unite contib and main ---
No way in hell... not the way things currently stand. > There is nothing easier than this. There is nothing more difficult than this. > - no need to explain the difference to everyone > - no need to try to tell the world that contrib exists > - no need for users to configure multiple repositories > - no need to move apps back and forth Sure, this sounds easy from a development standpoint. Reconsider this from a support standpoint. As things currently are, this is a horrid idea. > The only drawbacks would be: > - more security updates (this could lead to safer distro though, ditch the > unsafe apps altogether) Really? Some of those things are in contribs for precisely that reason... people need/want the apps but we've recognized them as being unsafe(ish). People moaned and complained about wu-ftpd going to contribs. People complained on the proposal of moving uucp to contribs. People complained about sendmail... so we ditch those altogether? Or do we do what we typically do and try to placate everyone and keep them there making the distro even more insecure? > - we would have to ditch some apps to make it fit on one DVD (we could > easily remove some crap from contrib, leading to more raliable/useful > apps!) Which would involve more QA, more testing, more post-release support, more developers paying attention to what's in contribs, and just plain old more of everything. People think it's bad enough with just the packages in main, but you want to double that with the stuff in contribs? The more packages we provide, the more room for error, the more bugs, the more post-release support, the more QA, the more testing, the more validation... can I say "more more more"? =) > The major advantages would be: > - Mandrake would outshine debian and suse in number of packages I didn't know we were in a contest for the number of packages we provided. I thought the question was quality, not quantity. > - people would get used to having thier dependencies met by urpmi FROM > DVD/CD, and would find it hard to live without urpmi, or go back to slow > and high bandwidth apt-get Sure, but if we're getting rid of the "crap" and "insecure" stuff (which I don't believe would happen, but let's pretend for the sake of argument), external repositories would *still* exist, so what's the change? And the apt-get argument is silly... people who like apt-get will still pine for apt-get, whether contribs and main are merged or not. > In other words, going back to any other distro would suck... fewer > packages, more complicated dependencies, no DVD with everything, more > downloading from the net... etc. etc. I don't see this argument. SUSE isn't available on the net like Mandrake is, so everything you get is on a DVD anyways. Other than the obvious arguments about Mandrake being better, there is no difference between the two. They would both be distributed on DVD. Now, if I was a longtime SUSE user, why would merging contribs and main mean anything to me? Debian is a different story, but it's free, and people dislike paying for stuff, so they'd use it anyways... bandwidth be damned. > There would of course have to be a separate, server-specific version of the > distro too, which would probably be small and out of date, but this is > already the case anyway (can you say SNF?). SNF is dead. MNF still exists, and Corporate Server is what you mean to refer to (MNF is not server-specific, it's application-specific). > Think it over before you flame me. Sorry Austin... I can see your intentions are good, but I think I would have to resign before seeing this come to pass unless some more dedicated help was hired to compensate for the sheer explosion in the number of packages to support. I am not at all interested in supporting a merger of contribs and main unless there is a *lot* more help in supporting it. The developers get it easy and to them, this would be more work but still manageable due to the community. For us end-support folk, who are less than 10% the size of the development team, this is an absolute nightmare waiting to happen. -- MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/ Online Security Resource Book; http://linsec.ca/ "lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import" {FE6F2AFD : 88D8 0D23 8D4B 3407 5BD7 66F9 2043 D0E5 FE6F 2AFD}
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