Whither Mandriva?

>> we've invested tons of work not only in RPM,
> What has been the return on that investment? I mean besides some incompatibility with all important RPM-based distros, and breaking many packages (causing a lot of unncessary work) in working towards the seemingly singular goal of having the cleanest RPM spec files, regardless of anything that might be lost in the process.
There's been lots of returns, but of course, it's come at the heaviest cost of often by breaking some legacy compatibility, but in order to move forwards in a rather messy environment where little innovation has really taken place for a while, nor much great deal of efforts has been conducted in improving the situation (especially not the historical, and the ghost that's forever haunted rpm and been used, although often misattributed to 'apt-get', fragmentation!) has been done by others (and by that, I refer to others in terms of rpm development, independent of which distributions).
It's a price worth paying for the long term, and the work is taking place in an upstream project we're actively involved with and have several developers actively working on, either through employment, or voluntarily through community, which you can follow at ie.: http://rpm5.org/cvs/fileview?f=rpm/CHANGES&v=1.3501.2...

>but also in KDE, deprecation of legacy perl tools with migration of python in process, have tons of actual R&D in place (compared to Mageia which has pretty much none as historically all of such was mostly conducted by Mandriva employees), only to mention a few things.
> So that is why patches to the Mandriva perl tools are being imported from Mageia?
"deprecation of legacy perl tools" kinda more than implies main focus being on other parts than on the perl tools Mageia still also maintains, with no currently known plans of otherwise for the future..
If you're criticizing the obviously beneficial and sane practice of actively merging changes from Mageia (and their mostly lack of interest in picking up much from us), well, it's not something I think we're to be critized or anything for in itself..

> Granted, there needs to be more innovation in Mageia, but there is a lot of work just cleaning up infrastructure-type issues, and plain bug fixing (and keeping up with other developments). These have been the focus until now, but I think after the release of Mageia 2, there will probably be more opportunity for technical innovation.
Yupp, you know, similarly can be said for ie. all the work I've invested in working on rpm full-time for a good while now..

>> There's also the lesser known, but crucial fact that laid the premise of Mageia,
>You know yourself that some kind of open governance has been years overdue. Both before and after Anne's involvement in Mandriva, Mandriva has had the opportunity to address this. I don't care what the catalyst was, but in Mageia Mandriva users now have a sustainable openly governed distribution to migrate to, that is attempting to maintain and improve the good parts of what was Mandriva.
> So far, it seems to be working.
Of course it was obvious, yet there was no interest in this from the same crowd (ie. more referring to the hupstream employees/ mageia founders, which 4/5 employees from takes up 4/6 seats on the board of Mageia, for which only Romain showed some great interest in back in 2007, just before leaving, but then none since his return a year or two later..) at Mandriva when I tried actively pushing the issue since 2007..

> Unfortunately, from my viewpoint, it looks like the community participation at Mandriva is in decline. For example, as a maintainer of a number of packages in the "main" distribution, I don't have any idea of the time lines for 2012 development, nor any idea on what is on the roadmap for 2012 and how I can contribute to that.
Of course, that's more than obvious, and pretty much makes up for the very essence and topic of this article, for which the posts and discussions conducted by myself and others are pretty much what it's made out of.
What is not clear? In my post referred to, I even gave my ultimatum about the situation improving or I'm leaving, should be pretty easy enough to understand, no? ;)

> On the other hand, Mageia has a schedule (which has mainly been kept, though RC and final release have slipped to accommodate a 3rd beta) and some specs.
Yupps, no arguing there, so trying to improve our structure in more similar fashions where appropriate is certainly good examples to follow and not for us to be in denial of nor fend off as evilness itself! :p

> I think you can see why at this stage I am prioritising Mageia work over Mandriva work (although I do try and keep them in sync as much as possible).
Yupp, but as said, I think that point was more than made and made for the very premise of this article itself and rather redundant to point out.. ;)

>> This again of course sounds like pure slander from someone disgruntled from anyone with the bias against Mandriva,
> Hmm, I am still spending some time contributing to Mandriva, and you say the text you are replying to constitutes slander and disgruntlement, and bias against Mandriva? I can't comprehend how you arrive at that conclusion.
Nope, this is a blooper on my part, what I meant was to write "bias against Mageia", more referring to myself and pointing out it's obviousness and not trying to present it as something else for what concerns where my involvement, feelings, motivations or anything else that any attempt of hiding indications of bias of might be portrayed as misleading..

Sorry for my miswriting which could be interpretted in implying anything else at your direction! :(

> For collaboration with Mageia, sharing efforts, inviting them to participate in a bigger foundation with serious commercial backing and such would certainly be welcome and to everyone's interest, but it's simply unrealistic and something few of "us" would be willing to accept if it were lead by people one simply doesn't trust.
There's a reason for us inviting and wishing participation from Mageia, while I stress out the point of starting with more "clean sheets" and avoiding it being lead by people simply not trusted by people in either of the camps.
I think we're pretty much on the same page, but that you're misinterpretating my intentions and motivations, unfortunately and ironically enough, very much so by my efforts of trying to avoid it..
I hope this post should clear things more up and that you read it more than once before (hopefully) replying to it again. :)
> Mageia is an openly governed distribution. The fact that Mandriva/Rosa etc. is not prepared to engage with Mageia at all over personal issues seems more of a problem for Mandriva/Rosa than for Mageia.
Who's said that we're not?
What I've said is that there are clearly *are* personal issues and that they needs to be acknowledged and try solve them or at least do our best in working around them for now, rather than living in denial and everyone talking behind eachothers' backs and what not..

Personally, I hate replying to posts online about non-technical manners, which is why commenting on this article is actually rather difficult to me as there's a lot more attached to it and you have to move in on personal matters which usually would best be adviced taking outside of the public..

But then again, there's a lot of thing being said about people arguing on the internet, which again provides some awkward relief of at least not being alone finding myself in such situations! :o)