What is needed to bring a package from edge to stable and from testing to main?
#1
Tue, 2016-08-23 10:50
pbor
-
- Offline
- 1 year 6 months ago
- 2016-08-23
Hi everyone,
Sorry for this potentially stupid question:
What is needed to bring a package that currently exists in testing or community for edge to the next stable release (3.5) and ideally even the main repo?
I am particularly looking for the openblas (or lapack) packages on a (reasonably) stable branch. I guess this is a fairly common requirement, as they implement very basic and extremely common linear algebra functions and are widely considered very mature.
Currently, we're forced to use edge, even though we'd clearly prefer stable for our CI environment.
Is there anything I can help with?
Every new release will be a branch created from our master branch (our current edge release). The only two repositories included in stable branches are main and community. This means any package that is currently in our testing repository will not be included in our new release. This is because testing is a kind of staging directory where we test packaging before we move them to one of the two other repositories (most probably community).
The difference between our main and community repositories is mostly the support period. Main has a support cycle of 2 years and community has a minimum support cycle of 6 months. When we create a new release (every 6 months) we will continiu to support the main repository for 1.5 year (a total of 2 years) but community support will stop (you will need to upgrade to the new release to continiu to have support). We also try to limit the amount of packages in main to only include base system packages, in base you can think of packages which are needed by other packages or are needed to setup a basic system. Please also keep in mind that our community repository is still young so many packages will still need to be moved to community, we try to do that when we bump into them.
As mentioned above, make sure to move packages from testing to community, or in special cases you can also ask them to be moved to main, our developers with commit access will review your request and move it to the appropriate repository. Looking at the two packages you mention, both already live in community so they will automatically be included in our upcoming 3.5 release.
Yes you can, thanks for asking.
* You can submit patches to github or mailing list (preferable to github PR's because of CI travis integration)
* Document things not yet documented on our Wiki (or improve the current ones)
* Check https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Contribute for more details.
Thanks a lot, very helpful reply!