I’m looking forward any news about possible contrib polices changes.
Contrib has some outdated packages which cannot even be installed. It is also interesting to notice that some cooker contrib packages are even older than 3.0 contrib packages.
Is there something new about what is going to be the distribution police for contrib packages in the future?
Thanks
No.
The only thing I can see happening is if at some point someone has the time to go through and eliminate unmaintained packages which is the majority of contrib at this point. Currently there is no one available to do this.
But going back to Mandrake/Mandriva Main and Non-free repos are for distro (ie. OpenMandriva) maintained packages and Contrib and Restricted are for Community maintained packages. Why would it change. Surely people don’t think it is the distributions fault that no one in the Community currently steps up to maintain packages in Contrib and Restricted? The best course in my opinion is in view of the current situation that Contrib and Restricted are drastically reduced in size.
This is one of a number of reasons why I’ve been contending lately that the Community Distribution model has failed. Unfortunately without more resources I don’t see anything changing. There are a number of distributions with a very small group of people contributing like Sabayon, Manjaro, and more. Most of them are not democracies like we are. No I’m not suggesting that we become “not a democracy” but I am suggesting that one can only reach one of 2 conclusions. Either it has not worked well or it has not worked at all.
I have said this a number of times but no one seems to even comment on it. Doesn’t anyone see how many were contributing when 2013 was being developed and how few we have contributing now? Have there simply been a number of contributors that, for one reason or another, were run off? As long as the Elephant in the Distribution isn’t addressed nothing is going to change.
Ben79,
I don’t know much of how one can manage a linux distribution. So I just can wonder that it is not done package by package because there may be hundreds, thousands of packages to be examined. Again, then I wonder that the main repos are updated with some kind of automatic tool. Sorry if I’m making naive assumptions at this point. But if this is the case, why not at least to try that with the contrib? This would give a first idea of the needs the Elephant have to be gentle.
Unfortunately, contrib is not well maintained. We need more people how can help on this.