I'm resuming my work on tiers. I still have some mixed feelings about it, because the code will be more complicated and harder to maintain when we implement them. The plans involve an update to the buildfarm database and the RESTful interface. Also, updates will be needed to the release procedure. Now, csw-upload-pkg only releases packages into unstable. After the change, it will be into unstable/core or unstable/active. Which is it? It has to be decided somehow. Also, moving packages between tiers must be implemented, and dependency tracking / checking. Sometimes I'm thinking it's going to just fall apart. But we've decided that we want tiers, so I'm sticking to the plan.
While I'm at it, the code and db update is not enough. Somebody has to actually go through our catalog and assign our 3000 or so packages to tiers. The work could happen on a less granular level, instead of processing individual packages, bundles can be processed instead. To those unfamiliar with the concept, tiers are about slicing our package catalog into three tiers: core - packages that we all care about. If a maintainer of a core package retires, we find a new maintainer for it. active - packages that have active maintainers and are receiving updates unmaintained - packages that do not receive updates (e.g. orphaned) but might be useful to users, so we don't want to drop them completely The main motivation behind tiers is user expectation setting. Currently, our catalogs are a big bag of old cruft and new shininess. We don't want a situation when a user downloads an old package which doesn't work and infers that the whole catalog is of the same quality. Dividing packages into tiers will allow us to set the expectations right. If you're installing from unmaintained, it's obvious that you're walking in a minefield. If you're installing from core, then your expectations are much higher. I'm calling for volunteers - I'm looking for someone to take the our catalogs and slice them up into tiers. The result will be three lists of package names, e.g. in a text file of some sensible format. JSON would be great. Any takers? Maciej _______________________________________________ maintainers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.opencsw.org/mailman/listinfo/maintainers .:: This mailing list's archive is public. ::.
