As announced elsewhere recently the “contrib” repo was renamed to “unsupported”. This takes affect in Cooker and new releases starting with OM Lx 4.0. Previous releases will continue with current naming.
This was done in the hope that it makes it easier to get across to users that the difference in this repository and others lies in the nature of it’s support. It is supposed to be community supported packages and is not “officially” supported by OM developers. In reality a majority of packages in this repo are “unsupported”. There has been considerable effort in the last year by some contributors and developers to maintain and update the more useful/popular packages but we simply don’t have enough people to maintain the vast number of packages in unsupported repo. (This is actually the largest repo in total packages, it is huge.)
This does not mean that OM devs won’t fix bugs or update packages in the repo it means they are no obligated to. In fact our devs do fix and update packages in contrib when they can and have time but is among their lowest priorities by design.
It has been requested by developers and package maintainers that we add some way to designate whether a given bug is filed against package/packages in the “unsupported” repo. The best I was able to come up with so far is to add this to Components for Cooker bugs.
This is meant to be a trial or an experiment. In part the hope is someone comes up with a better way to do this.
As far as I know in the past this was handled by the method;
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Developer or QA person looks at bug report and sees package in in contrib/unsupported repo.
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Decides “We will get to this one when and if someone has time.” Obviously taking in to consideration of how popular or necessary the package in question may be.
And until now that seemed to work well enough.
There will be no argument from me that our “issue tracker” is perfect or even the best it can be. I know that isn’t true. Also this discussion goes to things like procedure, rules and regulations which we have not written anywhere, at least not very well. And certainly not thoroughly. See here.
Suggestions are beyond welcome. they are being actively solicited.