Hi Damian, 'Twas brillig, and Damian Ivanov at 12/09/12 11:33 did gyre and gimble: > My name is Damian Ivanov. Xiao-Long Chen and me are the maintainers of > unity desktop environment for openSUSE and Fedora
Thanks for writing and getting in touch! It's certainly an interesting proposal, but it's really one that opens a box of many more related questions, some of which I'll try and touch on below. 1. External Repositories The "Here is my PPA where I do x, y and z" style approach to software repositories is always one we've deliberately avoided. It's creates significant problems for our (relatively) small teams when doing QA and addressing bug reports. For example if a user is using third party software and they open a bug report, the Triagers and packagers need to be aware of that, but it's often something users do not know to highlight or the decide by themselves that it's "not relevant" (when, in fact, it often can be due to some obscure library that is loaded dynamically that messes up the whole stack). It also creates significant problems on upgrades, if they have upgrade one package to a non-official version, that then might affect the rest of the distribution when it comes time to upgrade. None of the problems here are insurmountable, but they do exist and if we are to continue to produce a quality product, we need to keep a strong hold on the reigns with regards to this kind of stuff. 2. If external repositories are to be discouraged then the next obvious step is to try an incorporate it in Mageia repos directly. However, unity in particular is a pretty onerous package when it comes to non-upstream modifications to other packages. This is Canonical's choice when they designed things this way. I'd rather see more upstream collaboration, and I'd personally want Mageia to encourage that general principle, not sign up to the policy that downstream divergence is OK and something to be supported and encouraged. For this reason, for me personally, I'd exclude Unity from Mageia official repositories until the patches can be properly upstreamed. This is a primarily politically reasoned decision. I don't like divergence and I favour collaboration. 3. Ignoring the above points and thinking more practically, would you propose to use the same specs for Fedora, OpenSuse and Mageia for the packages or would you use separate ones? Sorry if this is stated already and I'm just blind! If they are the same, then I suspect this would cause even more issues as the distros obviously diverge in their packaging structure. 4. How do you handle automatic rebuilds when a package changes? e.g. when we change our official gtk, I presume you would want to automatically rebuild yours too? Also what if lower level things change, e.g. automated provides/requires extraction stuff provided at a lower level. I presume all this stuff "just works" in OBS? 5. Regarding using OBS generally for Mageia, I would not personally be against it in principle, but there are lots and lots of barriers there. We do already have a working build infrastructure and we can control it and have experience of fixing, tweaking it etc. We know it's quirks. With OBS it would be like starting again. That's not to say it wouldn't be the "right choice", but it could very easily not be the "right choice right now". It would take the primary sysadmins to be really enthusiastic and keen on any transition and know exactly what benefits it would bring us. Although I can't speak for everyone, I just don't think there is enough in the way of resources right now for that to be the case. 6. While I'm sure the web interface is nice, I presume it must link directly to a RCS in the background? e.g. we'd need it to hook into our subversion system right now. AFAIUI OBS had a some crazy custom RCS behind it. Is this now more generic? Can it hook up to subversion and/or git these days, how would it deal with user authentication? 7. There is a large part of me that wants to avoid adding everything and anything to Mageia just because we can. Even although this is community lead, and community driven, if we end up adding everything and anything we could easily end up being a jack of all trades and a master of none. We already have, IMO, too many options in some cases. Look at the login manager world, we have about five or six of those and only one is actually the one I'd want to use and that's GDM. The reason being that it is being proactive in genuinely solving the problems of today. We already have issues with most of the other DMs because they are not doing PAM correctly or are only half integrated. It's a lot of effort to keep up with things and unless upstream are being proactive (which many are not) then it falls to the downstream to pick up the slack. I personally have no interest in lightdm, slim, lxdm etc. but yet I seem to have to look at bug reports concerning them. Adding more stuff will inherently make things harder to deal with unless there is a corresponding increase in talented and pro-active contributors too! Just as a final note, I would like to thank you for your interest here. It's important to note that I'm all for collaboration and for encouraging contributions to Mageia whatever they are. I don't want some of my own, personal opinions to put anyone off, but I do want people to appreciate the broad reasons for such concerns (which I'm sure are shared by others too) and what would need to be done to address them to everyones ongoing satisfaction. All the best Col -- Colin Guthrie colin(at)mageia.org http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/ Open Source: Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/ PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/ Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
