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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Ben Bullard
ben79
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OpenMandriva-QA Team
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 04/21/2017 02:46 AM, rugyada wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAB7dtZFxkKDrKq=o64RL3t5BKxGspz879sV7CbwQ2JWPRxFwqQ@mail.gmail.com">
<pre wrap="">Hello,
Thanks for everything Crisb.
I think this is a good enlightening piece of text we can use and
publish at needing. With your kind permission.
2017-04-21 8:44 GMT+02:00 Crispin Boylan <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:cris@beebgames.com"><cris@beebgames.com></a>:
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<pre wrap="">i've fixed that one. somehow the file had gone missing.
The urpmi metadata is created when the packages are built and published to
the repo. sometimes this can go wrong, especially when the file is old -
there may have been an abf bug at the time the package was created for
example. particularly on the contrib repo which isnt rebuilt often.
you need to realise that the contrib repo is historically a set of packages
which were 'unsupported'. meaning that users would contribute them but they
wouldnt be worked on to the same level as a main repo package in terms of
making sure they worked fine etc. of course if people found problems with
them they might raise a bug and it might get fixed, but mostly it would be
the packager who fixed it (if they were still interested), and there would
be no formal qa performed on them. not all packages would be rebuilt every
release, and non building packages would not prevent the release.
the reasons for a package being in contrib:
* obsolete software which some people may use (bits of gnome 1 for example
are in here, because some old package still depend on them)
* niche things which would bring too much burden to maintain in main distro
* newer pieces of software which are not yet stable, change frequently and
may need frequent rebuilds
* just stuff people wanted to contribute
historically things would move from main to contrib as they became less
useful, and likewise they would move from contrib to main as they became
more popular.
of course in the old days there were more people working on the distro so
this repo decay would not be so much of an issue. there has never been
enough people working on omv to extend to properly fixing everything in
contrib.
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