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Re: [Cooker] Some questions about Mandriva
Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
I'll answer what I can.
How many "pieces of software" do you have in your distribution? Do you
distinguish between "source packages" and "binary packages"? (if yes,
give numbers for both). Are there subdivisions in the set of packages (by
kind of support, by "freeness")? Are all packages supported the same way,
or are there different levels of support? (If different levels, how many
packages are supported with each level?) Are some packages imported from
another distribution, or are most of your packages done from scratch by
your developers ?
We have 22192 binary packages and 9232 source packages divided into:
- free software
- officially supported
- updates go through security and QA teams
- 2664 source packages, 6028 binary packages
- free software
- updates are done directly by packagers
- 6522 source packages, 10446 binary packages
- non-free but distributable software
- 41 source packages, 117 binary packages
Each of these is divided into:
release: the initial released distribution
updates: updated packages (security and bug fixes)
backports: backports of new versions, handled directly by packagers
In addition a couple of commercial non-distributable packages exist for
some boxed editions.
Most of the packages are done from scratch but some are adapted from
Q2. Your developers
What's a "developer" in your distribution? How many developers do you
have? How many of these developers were active in 2007? Does a company
(which one?) employ a large number of developers? Do you have different
"classes" of developers, or does everybody have the same access right to
all your packages? How do you integrate new developers? How do you
handle contributors who don't have access rights to the archive? (is
there some kind of mentoring/sponsoring system?)
I think there are about 50 active packagers.
Only few packages have some level of access restriction:
official kernel (alternative ones exist), initscripts, glibc, binutils,
util-linux-ng. However, access to these is given quite easily if wanted.
Q3. Developers and packages ownership
What's the relationship between developers and packages? Does each
package have an assigned developer, or can everybody modify all packages
without stepping on anyone's toes? Are packages mostly maintained by
teams, or by developers working alone?
Most packages have an assigned maintainer, but many packages are
commonly updated by other packagers as well.
- Did I send that mail to the right mailing list?
- Do you think that this initiative is interesting?
- Do you think that this should move to a seperate mailing list? Would
you participate in such a mailing list?
- Can you suggest a project that could host such a mailing list without
annoying anyone? :)
- Any other suggestions?
Thank you for reading me so far -- and for answering my questions if you
did. ;) If you want me to ping you when I'll publish the answers, just
drop me a mail.