Security, Updates and More – Oh My!

From Stew Benedict (aka stewb)

If you’ve been using Mageia 1, you may have been wondering where all the updates are. It’s customary to get quite a few updated packages in the first month or so of a new distribution to correct bugs and address security issues. Don’t worry, we’ve been working on that too.

As a new organization, and a community driven one, we first had to work out how to do the updates.  While some of us have experience from previous lives, we weren’t entirely satisfied with the old process and wanted to make sure our new community of users and packagers had an input into how we’ll do things.

So, after discussion and some work behind the scenes for the mechanics of issuing an update, we have now have a process where the security team, the QA team, and the packager maintainer will all work together to build, test, and issue new updates. If you use MySQL, you should have seen the first update appear in the last couple of days and more are in the pipeline. Policies managing the process have been added to our wiki, and as we work through the first few packages we’re refining and documenting the process more thoroughly.
For Mageia 1, we have a special exception for updates. So called “missing” packages that weren’t part of Mageia 1 but are in our sister distribution, can be issued as an update, rather than a backport, provided they pass the QA process.

Hey, What About Backports?

We haven’t forgotten backports either, but we can’t do everything at once :). The discussions have just started on the development mail list as to how we will handle backports. Sometimes backport repositories have a somewhat bad reputation, and we want to fashion a process and policy such that ours can avoid being discounted as “don’t use those”. If you want to get involved in fashioning how they will work, please subscribe to the mail list and voice your opinion.

A nice summary of the community discussions

How You Can Help

We want to be the best distribution ever for our users, but we need your help. We use Bugzilla as our tracking tool to work packages through the update process. If you find a bug or are aware of a security issue, please open a bug (after checking if one doesn’t already exist) in bugzilla. The more concise the information you provide in the bug (patches, links to fixes or discussions of the issue), the more quickly one of our packagers will be able to issue an updated package to QA for testing so that you can get the fix.

Thanks For Your Patience and Support

We know some of you have been asking about updates and we haven’t forgotten. We’d like to think we cleansed a lot of bugs before issuing Mageia 1, but there are always a few more we’ve missed. Now that the process is in place for updates we hope to provide fixes in a timely fashion.

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17 Responses to Security, Updates and More – Oh My!

  1. Jin-tong says:

    I’d like to know how to suggest a package that was formerly in the PLF repository, but is now missing in Mageia 1. Thanks for all your efforts.

  2. Pingback: Sicherheit, Aktualisierungen und mehr – Meine Güte! | Mageia Blog (Deutsch)

  3. Ineteq says:

    Thanks for the heads-up. What about firefox? With this new release schedule of Mozilla, will the new firefox releases get into updates? Specifically will firefox 5 get into Mageia 1?

  4. Since you’re starting out and want all kinds of advice 😉 you might consider hosting your forums somewhere else besides lwn.net. I think it’s possible that a lot of people would like to contribute to discussions but don’t want to pay $7 a month to do so. I understand that LWN needs to pay their bills but in this day and age allowing people to post comments for free is the norm.

    Oh and as far as backports are concerned. Some things like aes-intel should be considered missing software, not additional software that needs to be backported. I’d be happy if it just showed up in the repos at some point. Now a mesa upgrade to 7.11 would be considered a backport which is necessary for anyone who’s bought an Intel machine in the last year (Sandy Bridge).

    • wobo says:

      > you might consider hosting your forums somewhere else besides lwn.net

      Our forums are hosted on our own server. If you are referring to the link in our blog, it points to an article by Nathan Willis, talking about Mageia on lwn.net. It’s not a Mageia publishing. As to your suggestions, feel free to write such requests in our Bugzilla.

  5. JanKusanagi says:

    Just so you know, you guys/gals rock 🙂

  6. Pingback: Mageia – miesiąc po „1″ « Gunthera miejsce w sieci

  7. Rodger says:

    great distro rock solid!

  8. Ollie says:

    Thank you for a rock solid distro !
    4 of my friends installed it on their laptop and very satisfied.
    On the side note … is it possible to add Truecrypt as downloadable/installable app.

  9. edu says:

    hei, thx all of you for your work. A ”free” fork of mandriva it,s a very sexy thing. I turn to mageia 1 kde,after trying many distros. It,s fast,compared to other kde 4 distros. My question is, how do i localize mageia 1 for romanian (ro) ?. I
    s there any tool,or i have to look in the software manager for kde i18n,etc.. ? I,ve installed the cd i585 version.
    Thanks again,and sorry for my bad english.

  10. linuxfanatik says:

    I’ve not been on Mandriva before or even Mageia (how do you pronounce it?) 😉 though I’ve been on and used to like Mandrake in another life-time… this one promises to be really cool – it whispers of Nice, Juan-les-Pins – a town by the ‘med’ beach in early summer when I was young and free,,, taking a trip to see Dominique Channel in Graz so long ago now (sigh)! Ah Well! At least I have the magic of Mageia to keep me company and remind me of the Cote d’ Azzur! linuxfanatik

  11. Keith says:

    Cool. I just ordered a copy from the same site I always order copies of Mandriva from and it should be here in a few days; I hope I like it (I’m sure it will, if it’s like Mandriva). Just one question I can’t find the answer to: how do you pronounce Mageia?