Bug 825

Well, for one, a backport is usually a package that was updated. MiB people are quite wrong on the usage of that word, at least the way that the vast majority of packagers use it. So IMHO, we should be better to stick on the word "packages" ( and in the case of opera, flash, etc, "non-free packages" ). 


Then I personnaly do not use flash adobe and java, and yet can see most of the web sites on the web. There is openjdk to replace sun java, and adobe acrobat is just asking for trouble ( several security issues ) so does adobe flash. And regarding opera, I do think there is a large choice of browser, so I doubt that is it so blocking than what you depict.

Regarding a easyurpmi, this is a bad idea :

- this create a single point of failure. When the site is down, people start to panic. I am root on the server of the original one ( http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/  the first one ), so I speak based on my experience

- since everything is centralized, there is fierce competion about being present or not in the default list. Since we refused to put everything under the sun, every 3rd party group have copied easyurpmi and asked to people to use this one and not the others. This create confusion and efforts duplication. And create security problems ( what if I just create my own set of rpm and then place a trojan inside ? ).

- almost all clones do not give back source code ( despites saying "this is GPL v2" ), nor properly link the original one, likely for search engine related reasons. That's rather wrong, IMHO

- website is usually not fully translated. The site you gave is in english and russian.

- Before, the whole user experience was "you need to type a command as root given by a web site that someone else on the internet gave you". We finally got ride of the "type a command as root", yet we changed this for "give your root password when your browser ask for it on a website given by someone on internet", which is not much better in term of bad habits to give to users.

- the website cannot be found except if you know it exist, that's more complex than needed.

So personnaly, for all theses reasons, I would be against adding easyurpmi for mageia. But I also know that despites having various reasons, someone will do it, since this is free software.

CC: (none) => misc

I also vote for a Mageia site like easyurpmi.zarb.org .
This is a big help for many users. This makes it very easy to add the right mirrors.

CC: (none) => flink

@ sysadmin-bugs

Has anything been decided, yet?

CC: (none) => marja11

Closing as WONTFIX.

Reasoning as follows, additional to what misc already stated in #1:

- Mageia discourages the usage of 3rd party repos, because that way we can ensure stability and quality of the distro. Adding various 3rd party repositories is the only valid use case for easyurpmi.

- so for adding the standard Mageia repositories, easyurpmi has no advantages, it only brings disadvantages: you need to execute arbitrary commands from some arbitrary website as root, translations issues, etc. as already explained above.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
CC: (none) => doktor5000
Resolution: (none) => WONTFIX

I agree with comments #1 and #4.
Note that it would be more secure to download any wanted 3rd-party package as an ordinary user, and then install it.  Not difficult.

Of the examples given in the report, upstream Opera installs easily (and is easily found), java is provided by Openjdk, and Mageia has at least 3 open source packages that can read pdf files, to use in place of Acrobat reader.

CC: (none) => andre999mga