On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 14:56 -0600, Mike McGrath wrote: > Do we know how other distros deal with this? I can speak for Mandriva. Mandriva has /main and /contrib repositories (and a couple of others for non-free stuff, but that's not important in this context). /main contains officially-supported packages; around half of the total. It'd be a bit like the old Core / Extras split, except rather more in Core and rather less in Extras. Maintainers are not allowed to directly push updates to /main, ever. All updates must be sent to a testing repository with a clear explanation of the update's purpose; this usually means a security advisory number, or a bug number. By policy, updates should contain the minimum changes necessary to fix the specific issue(s) addressed (though sometimes this rule is somewhat bent). All updates are gatekept by the security team, though the testing repository is available to anyone, and security team takes account of feedback on the /testing builds (so if the userbase notices they're broken, that word gets back to the devs / security team and the update will be rejected until it's fixed). /contrib runs more on the honor system. Maintainers are in charge of pushing updates there, and can do it directly if they so choose. There is a /contrib/testing repository they can choose to use to have their updates tested before being pushed. Most maintainers are fairly careful not to push broken updates to /contrib, in practice. Of course, Mandriva also has separate /backports repositories for non-bugfix/security updates. As I've mentioned before. Which changes the equation slightly (if you just want to send out Shiny New Version 2.0, it goes out as a backport, not an update). There's never been any significant friction over the system that I recall. Maintainers don't seem to be particularly unhappy with it. It would probably be much more fractious without the backports system, though. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
