I think this whole question is not done with an easy answer. It can
also not be ssen in a black/white mode. I see the clear insight of
Michael's suggestion which is a black/white point of view. Not
maintained? Kick it out (well, not "out" but into the ante-room). But
I also see the reality from the user's POV. As for technical skilled
or experienced users (including server admins) the main question is
that those packages which are available should work and be maintained.
Period.
But there is also the vast group of the "unwashed masses" including
those we want to attract to Mageia. Many of those do look at the sheer
number of packages (like, "I'd rather switch to Foo Linux which offers
2 million packages while Mageia only offers 5,000"). Yes, I know, it's
rather dumb and those users are the first to complain about some
missing icon. But they are a large part of the users out there.

So we have to find a middle way between the pure and the ugly. How to
find that, I don't know, this is far beyond my knowledge. I only
wanted to comment on the "philosophical" side of the problem. For me
as a mostly non-technical guy the best solution would be the "flag"
solution. Forget the main/contrib split and just flag unmaintained
rpms so that the user sees it in the GUI. How to accomplish that on
the CLI with urpmi I don't know. Then people who are security- aware
like server admins can easily avoid unmaintained packages or open a
request in Bugzilla which **may** inspire somebody to pick up the poor
unmaintained package.

One comment on the mirror maintainer part of the story:
I was mentioned by Michael several times as an example of a certain
kind of mirror maintainers. Yes, ressources are tight but not that
tight. As I understood the "official mirror" as suggested by Olivier
was about to fill up to 700 GB during the next 3 years - given that we
will have 2 releases per year. Most of the official mirrors of
Mandriva do not provide 6 releases, moreso when the life cycle of a
release is less than 2 years.
So, a realistic size woul be more like 450-500 GB at the most which is
easily done with today's hardware. This is not a problem. Time is not
a problem either for such people like me. The only problem I still see
from the mirror maintainer's side is the way to deal with "tainted"
packages wrt the mirrorlist (as already mentioned).

-- 
wobo

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