On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Samuel Verschelde wrote: > > Indeed, however it helps showing that there's a set of packages which is > supported, and another one which is only on behalf of the maintainer. In a > community driven distribution, this distinction may remains valid : some > packages are officially supported by the distribution, others may or may not > be, depending on the maintainer (or lack of maintainer).
We don't need separate medias to show that there are two sets of packages, supported and unsupported. I think using separate medias adds useless complexity. We could for instance provide a file on api.mageia.org containing the list of officially supported packages. It would also have other advantages : - You can see how many unsupported packages and which ones are installed on your system. This is not possible with main/contrib, if you enabled contrib temporarly to install a few packages. - You can change the package status (supported/unsupported) after the release, if needed. - Some packages can have a different support time. On Mandriva, "Base system & components" was supported longer, but it was not clear which packages were part of this. - This file could also list known security issues for unsupported and supported packages. - Some packages have a lot of optional plugins, and we build them all, adding a lot of build requires. With main/contrib separation we need to add all the build dependencies to main, even if most of them are not runtime dependencies.
