| Summary: | change packages update policy | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Mageia | Reporter: | nikos papadopoulos <nikos769> |
| Component: | RPM Packages | Assignee: | Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad> |
| Status: | RESOLVED WONTFIX | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | normal | ||
| Priority: | Normal | CC: | marja11 |
| Version: | 5 | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Source RPM: | CVE: | ||
| Status comment: | |||
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Description
nikos papadopoulos
2016-12-11 16:45:26 CET
Hi Nikos, Thanks for your concern :-) Upgrading Mageia 5 with the latest versions of most programs and with new programs would kill our QA team. It is actually much _more_ work than releasing Mageia_6 Despite it being a large team, QA has more than enough work testing security updates and other bug fixes for Mageia 5, and testing pre-Mga6 isos. Individual packages that are added, fixed or upgraded in _Cauldron_ are not tested by QA team before they are pushed to a cauldron */release repository, but are tested by our developers, packagers and other interested contributors and cauldron users, almost always only after they're pushed to */release. It is impossible to push new packages or package upgrades to a stable release like that, it would stop being stable! So we'd need QA team to test all those upgrades before they're pushed. Over the last 10 months roughly twenty times as many bug fixes and package upgrades got pushed into cauldron than into Mageia 5. Tripling the size of QA team would not be enough to make your proposal possible. :-( I didn't even mention the extra effort and time it would need from our packagers and some other teams. However, it is possible to help Mageia 6 release to come sooner :-) More hands make lighter work. Every single volunteer that you find for any team, helps :-) https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Contributing We cannot change our updates policy because it would give too much extra work, so closing this report as wontfix (I wish we had a "Can't fix" resolution) Status:
NEW =>
RESOLVED Adjusting the summary, because we will, of course, release Mageia 6 when it is ready! Summary:
change packages update policy or release Mageia 6 =>
change packages update policy Well... just don't come around later, saying "We didn't know...", "We thought that...". The warning signs were there. I pointed them at you. Waved my hands. Even shouted out. And, as we all know, ignoring the problem usually, doesn't fix it; just makes it bigger. Maybe there's another solution to this. Or maybe it is unsolvable. Anyway... You can shout at us all you want, it doesn't solve anything. Also, note that Mageia is a community distro, it is built and maintained by the community, which you are a part of. There is no "we users" and "you developers." We are part of one team, so you can help or not, but that's on you. With all that being said, your concerns are understandable and are undoubtedly shared by other users. One thing that needs to be understood here is that we never intended for the Mageia 6 release cycle to take this long. We aim hypothetically for a 9 month cycle; it has tended to be more like 12 months, but obviously this one has taken a lot longer. The primary reason it has taken so long is KDE ceasing to support KDE4 too soon, forcing us to move to Plasma 5 well before it was ready, and then it taking them a *long* time to get it into a halfway usable state. We have also suffered from a loss of some developers, which speaks to the reason for my first paragraph. This has also delayed us fixing some critical bugs on our side. So know that we aren't just "holding up the Mageia 6 release" for no reason. We can't release it if it's ultra buggy and unusable. That doesn't help anyone. In fact, with that, we'd EOL Mageia 5 and then have no usable supported releases. That's not a solution. We hope to release Mageia 6 soonish, but as Marja said, more hands make light work. In the meantime, there still is some validity to your concerns about updated application availability. Historically, the backports repository has been our solution to this issue, but it is not a very good one. Since it's just one store, mixing several unrelated packages, when the intended users of it will only be interested in one or a few packages from it, our tools don't support its intended use case, so it's very difficult to make use of this on the user side. Partially due to the work involved, and probably partially due to the other concern, backports has been underutilized by packagers as well, making few updated applications available. We have discussed switching to a better build system, such as Fedora's Koji, in the future. Whether we do or not, Mageia 6 will be available as a build target in Fedora's COPR system, which will allow the creation of individual per-application (or sets of related applications) repositories (called COPRs), similar to the PPA concept in Ubuntu. This will allow making backports where unrelated packages aren't mixed and users can more easily specify which ones they're interested in using and having it just work. So, if this system is utilized as hoped, it should greatly address your concerns here. The key will be packagers making use of it to make these updated applications available to users. For this to be successful to its greatest potential, we will need there to be more active packagers, which again speaks to my first point. Feel free to get involved and contribute to this effort. 1st of all I am not shouting at you, I am shouting out, so you can not ignore the problem (whether you ignore it deliberately or unconsciously). 2nd, there are obvious mistakes in your thinking, which I will point out. (and when I am saying you, I mean the developers as a whole, as a group mentality) You think everyone can be a packager, and you blame the community. No; packaging is not for everyone. It's difficult and requires a certain mindset (technical thinking, good memory, knowledge). It also requires a good computer. Not everyone has all that. Not everyone is a potential developer. You think everyone will contribute equally. Again "No"; others will contribute more, others will contribute less. And, of course there are countless of ways someone contributes. Stretching from participating in the development of the kernel, to just saying a good word about linux. You make big plans, when the resources of the community are limited. You bite more than you can chew (as it has been proven by Time). In order to solve one problem (KDE and other issues you mention), you create a bigger one. A delay that is not acceptable by today's standards. Basically, you invite the potential user to... "Come on, install Mageia, and live in a time capsule, two years in the past". How many people do you expect to "bite" that? And what is worse, you ignore the problem. Recently, in that frame, you have come up with this slogan that makes absolutely no sense: Mageia Linux "Will be released when ready!" It reminds me of Bush's "Stay the coarse". But, if you think that this has any logic, and in order to lighten the discussion, I will propose a better, more catchy phrase, which, I am sure, will sweep the Linux world like a hurricane, and make everyone want to join in: Mageia Linux "Today it is Tuesday, tomorrow will be Wednesday!" (Whaaat ?) To sum up... obviously the development model you have chosen is not working any more. So you need some ground braking thinking. I don't know what that would be. Maybe, you have to rethink that all "distribution equals packaging" thingy. How much time, how many resources are spend on packaging? (personally, I think that this "every distribution and a different packaging system" attitude is holding linux back). Maybe you have to say "KDE... no thank you", and switch to a simpler desktop suite (example Mate, lxqt). Maybe... I don't know... --- --- And some extra thoughts... As far as the "backports" system is concerned (speaking from the user's point of view), it seems to be a conservative system, aiming at stability and security. It has worked pretty well. For example, applications with major bugs were updated (at least, that's what I remember). Ok, I get it. I spare the latest developments for less crashes. All that, of course, if you release a new version of Mageia every year. By the way, if you want to know why Microsoft's Windows and Facebook got so successful, it is (partially) because they adopted the mentality... "Get it out now, get it out before the competition... and we'll think of the problems later." Of course, I am not saying to adopt this (it would be a wrong move, for many reasons), but I am pointing out how important timing is (in our modern industrial world, blah, blah, etc). |