LWN: Comments on "Mageia bootstraps its package update policy"

Support

oak — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 19:32:27 +0000

Distro does packaging of programs, program's documentation comes from upstream.

If somebody wants to keep statistics on maturity and level of documentation of these upstream projects that distro packages, I guess distro could provide some infrastructure for users for that. I'm not really sure what value that would provide or who would be interested to maintain it though.

The levels you proposed were way too vague. Distro having e.g. 90 programs at level 3 doesn't really tell anything. If I would be interested about some specific program, I would want to know what specific features it has, how well its UI and documentation is translated, has it fixed my pet peeves from earlier versions etc. things that e.g. Ubuntu's Launchpad collects.

Support

danielpf — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:05:57 +0000

What you mean by support is the post-"sale" phase, which is clearly a valid viewpoint. What I was thinking was rather the pre-"sale" phase where it may be useful for the "customer" to know before "buying" what is the level of attention given to the released program.

Support

sfeam — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:02:58 +0000

That doesn't seem to be a list of "support levels", but rather a list of brokenness levels. If a program doesn't work for me, it's of little consolation to know that the failure rate for others is 1% as opposed to 10%.

Support levels would be more like
1) We provide a bug tracker
2) We will help with debugging and mediate bug reports being sent upstream
3) We will fix the bug in-house and provide an updated package

Support

danielpf — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:55:59 +0000

For any distro program it could be useful to provide a standard mark for the support level. Here is a first try:

Support level 1:
Program can be compiled from source and starts.

Support level 2:
Program has been tested to run correctly for at least 90% of the most used functionalities.
Documentation is up-to-date and correct at over 90%.

Support level 3:
Program has been tested to run correctly for at least 99% of the most used functionalities.
Documentation is up-to-date and correct at over 99%.