2009-05-06

adopt a mandriva package campaign

mandriva is a great distribution, with tons of packages available. the downside is that contributors have a lot work to do, and usually maintain quite a lot of rpms. and when they go mia, or leave to see whether sky is still blue elsewhere, their packages become orphan.

that's sad.

and as time goes by, we end up with a huge list of unmaintained packages. :-(

this is where you can help. those packages are available. for you. for free.

have a look to the list. try to see if you're using regularly some of them. or even better, if you contribute to upstream project, either as a coder, or a translator. then claim your will to jump in.

you might fear that you don't know anything about rpm packaging. but that's the beauty of this campaign: the rpms are already created, and just need to be maintained. that is, update them when there's a new version, or fix a packaging bug. when this is the case (and assuming you have the rights to upload a package), a single command will update it to latest version:

$ mdvsys update your-package new-version
then, update your system to this version and check if it works correctly. remember, you grabbed a package because you're using it - so you know whether the new version behaves as expected!

and if there is a problem that you don't know how to fix, ask on cooker mailing-list. there will be a lot of experienced people that will be able to help you. and as time goes by, you'll become more and more comfident, ready to package new software not yet available in mandriva.

now is your turn to chime in. come on, you know you want to do it...

6 comments:

  1. I know this is slightly heretical, but have you ever thought about rebasing some of your packaging on the Feodra RPMs?

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  2. > try to see if you're using regularly some of them.

    Say what? The list you linked to seems to contain many critical things like Bash, cdrkit, m4 that most Mandriva users run at some point (sometimes without even realizing it as they are part of the infrastructure). Looks bad. Does helping here require that one is running Cooker?

    > then claim your will to jump in.

    how, exactly?

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  3. @coreyburger: this campaign is about adopting existing packages. not about creating new packages. so in that case, there's no need to check fedora's pkgs.

    @ruohtula: yes, some packages listed are quite important. and it's not because they are orphans that no-one is updating them. especially the really important ones... for example, bash 4 has been submitted to cooker recently. but the small pkgs might not be looked closely, and that's where you can make the difference.

    i'm not sure you are forced to run cooker to maintain a package - but that definitely is easier imo.

    finally, we're going to check how to welcome new contributor. the interest of this campaign is that adopting an existing package requires less knowledge than building a new one from scratch. check cooker@ mailing-list, where we'll be discussing this issue.

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  4. > there's no need to check fedora's pkgs

    I'm not sure Corey Burger's idea should be dismissed so quickly. What if the equivalent package in Fedora has a maintainer ? Would it be possible to just import it in Mandriva and rebuild it there, syncing regularly ? Maybe the infrastructure to do that is not there yet, but I think it could be a *very* *very* useful addition. I could work on that if the idea is fine with the Mandriva leaders.

    Being a Fedora contributor who uses Mandriva at work, I've rebuilt Fedora packages on Mandriva many times already, and it always worked perfectly.

    But this should probably be discussed on the cooker mailing-list, I'll post there.

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  5. While looking over the fence to see the colour of the grass at other distros, I noticed Frugalware has pretty useful-looking docs for newbie contributors:
    http://frugalware.org/docs/stable/getting-involved.html
    What would be the Mandriva equivalent?

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  6. To be a successful campaign, I think it must be made as easy as we can. The most computer users around the world are Windows users, so guided procedures to do the job will help to "automate" the process to these users.

    The goal of Mandriva distro is the ease of use, why not when developing too?

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