Mageia Blog (English)

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.

It’s nice to be able to say: there’s more life in Mageia than ever!

First, thanks to everyone who took the trouble to not only try Mageia 1, but to write about it – in articles and on their blogs. You’ve encouraged even more people to try it out, and come onto the lists and forums with their suggestions, issues, reactions and – perhaps most importantly for a growing community – their contributions of time and skills.

Take a minute to look at the reviews here and if you know of one we haven’t listed, let us know!

Second, thanks to all our great Mageia people – it’s great to be part of such a varied group of people, all working together to make something good. Now we’d like to extend a warm welcome to new contributors.

There’s lots happening in the Mageia community. All sorts of discussion is happening; where will we take Mageia next? We’ve got all the basics in place – our organisation, our Code of Conduct, and a growing sense of who we are and what we’re about.

And we’ll welcome whatever you bring – your new ideas, new skills and new contributions. Whatever your interest, there’s a team for you; take a look here and see what might suit you.

Welcome to post-release Mageia – help us to make sure it just keeps getting better.