Losses at Mandriva [LWN.net]

Losses at Mandriva

Posted Dec 3, 2008 4:36 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159)
In reply to: Losses at Mandriva by MattPerry
Parent article: Losses at Mandriva

What do you do when the upstream package maintainer doesn't want to maintain the package for you?

In the situation Adam mentioned, Fedora was using an older OpenSync package in order to work with another package they are distributing. Could they really expect the upstream maintainer to provide an up to date package for software they consider obsolete? How about handling security issues?

Now consider the other packages that might rely on OpenSync. Lets say that they produce different binaries when compiled against the different versions of OpenSync. Should the distribution expect all these upstream package maintainers to produce a second version of their package?

These are the sort of integration problems distribution packagers face all the time, and it doesn't seem sensible to expect unaffiliated package maintainers to place the same importance on the problems.

Things are a bit simpler at the application layer, where upgrades won't break other parts of the distro. It isn't always simple though, with applications like Firefox providing components that get reused by other packages.

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Losses at Mandriva

Posted Dec 4, 2008 18:59 UTC (Thu) by AdamW (guest, #48457) [Link]

Just to note, you inverted the example. I use opensync 0.22 in Mandriva because it's the stable release that works and I actually *test* that stuff. 0.3 is the current entirely unstable development branch that cannot do anything useful and frequently eats people's data. However, several distributions (including Fedora) didn't bother to read the big DON'T USE 0.3! warning at www.opensync.org and packaged 0.3 anyway. And, consequently, their packages are utterly useless.