Contrib/Discussion

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Revision as of 00:44, 17 August 2008

Contrib: The Universal Repository for Third-party Packages

Our goals is to setup some kind of universal repository for third-party packages.

This repository should be viewed as a community-driven extension of Factory, with all standards and limitations applied.

Current model of third-party packages for openSUSE is broken in many user's opinion. There are lots of packages across hundreds of Build Service projects, which is hard to download & navigate. Packages are often duplicates, and aren't tested. Current model is good for experimentation and development but is bad idea for deployment.

We want to make a new model, which suites deployment & distribution.

Additionally, there are lots of packages, that exist in other distros, but aren't packaged for openSUSE, and we are here to close this gap.

In the mailing list ([opensuse-factory] if the community contributed?), we had a discussion on 12.8.2008.

There were discussions to get 3rd party packages directly into Factory, but those discussions fails, because Novell cannot guarantee updates for such packages.

We - the community - came to consensus to establish a big, united third-party packages repository for openSUSE (in the Build Service), with the goal of making those packages stable and easily searchable & downloadable.

This repository sits somewhere in between openSUSE itself "Factory", and small user's Build Service projects, where few packages usually exist.

There are several limitations on what is allowed:

- The packages should be testable during openSUSE development period

- No new packages after openSUSE feature freeze

- The repository is frozen at openSUSE release time

- Everything is built against the openSUSE base or packages from this repository

- Stability - Only tested & stable packages will be allowed.

- No duplication of packages from factory, unless it has a justified reason (such as development dependency)

(by Martin Schlander, Andreas Jaeger and Alexey Eromenko "Technologov")

Open issues & Packages

Open issues:

• Licensing and patents - undecided yet. (we need another discussion on that topic)
  • no way if we are going to use the buildservice --Michal-m
• Security - perhaps Novell security guys can give us basic guidelines.
• Upstream vs. patched. (easy example: KVM from Alexander Graf, or from Sourceforge.net - difference is big)
• One-click install - to use or not to use... that is the question.
  • software.o.o/search generates YMPs automatically, what's the question here? --Michal-m

Packages:

First group of packages will be taken from other RPM repositories (including Mandriva, Fedora, and openSUSE Build Service). Later on we will add new SPEC files to build RPMs.

For a quick list of planned packages, visit the "candidates" page /packages

Quick Comparison

Quick Comparison:

openSUSE 10.3 - 8 GB per architecture (i586+noarch) = 6000 packages (I speak only about official packages, not third-party ones)

Debian 4.0 - 13 GB per architecture = 18000 packages

Which mean that Debian uses ~+60% more space for +200% more packages, because most big packages exist in both openSUSE and Debian. Small utilities, however, are severely lacking in openSUSE. Our goal is to eliminate this gap.

Interested People

Interested People :

• Alexey "Technologov" (al4321@gmail.com)
• Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@gmail.com>)
• Michal Marek (User:Michal-m)
• Boyd Lynn Gerber User:gerberb
• James Oakley User:jimfunk
• Pascal Bleser User:Pbleser
• Cristian Rodríguez User:Elvigia

-Alexey "Technologov", 13.8.2008. (al4321@gmail.com)