Considerations on Mondorescue packaging for Mageia

There has been a recent discussion on the Mageia mailing list on the mondo package which is one of the last having a non-coherent version schema with the one in Mandriva, thus blocking the update.

I was annoyed by this, so took the opportunity I was at Solution Linux to discuss about it with Anne Nicolas and Erwan Velu to try to find the best solution. Well, in that case, it seems there is no 😦

Upstream has move 5 years ago to fix a discrepency: renaming versions that were 2.04,2.05 into 2.0.4, 2.0.5 especially in order to facilitate life of distributions. But Mandriva was already at that time with 2.05. And now, when upstream is at 2.2.9.x, Mandriva is still at 2.29.x. And nobody really understand today why there is a mismatch between Mandriva and upstream.

So I think that Mageia should not suffer from that, even if it means that upgrade from Mandriva to Mageia won’t work out of the box for mondo. Well, in fact, people will keep the mandriva package (2.29 being higher than 2.2.9). So the receipe is, when you’ll upgrade from Mandriva to Mageia around the 1st of June, you’ll have to remove manually the mondo package to reinstall it afterwards. Not too complicated, and will avoid packagers to maintain an Epoch for the rest of Mageia, when the distribution is just started. Note that it just affect the mondo package. All the others are already sane.

All other attempts we tried to evoke had other drawbacks, and as much as I hate having exceptions in process, for once, I think this will be much less painful afterwards. Also not everybody will upgrade. Some will directly install and won’t see anything. A small price to pay to be clean for the future (after all it’s what Mageia is all about no ?) !!

Tags: Mageia, Mandriva, Mondorescue, packaging