Cooker

Cooker is the Mandriva Linux development distribution. It evolves constantly, thus being called an "unstable distribution", and is regulary forked to produce a stable distribution for release. Think of it as a version of Mandrivalinux that is not meant for everyday use. See the Mandriva Linux cooker page for more details.

• Cooker home
• Cooker FAQ
• Cooker HowTo
• Contributor HowTo

Maintainers

• List of package maintainers: http://qa.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/srpmmaints.cgi
• The mailing-list:
  • "weekly report of old packages, or broken dependencies are send, these packages have to be built in priority"
  • register by sending an email to [email protected] with "SUB maintainers" in the subject line

Cooker and Java

• http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/JavaPackaging

License issues

Mandriva valid licenses: http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaLicenses

Short Story: new to cooker

Once upon a time a Mandriva user felt the desire to play an active role in his community… (please fill in the blanks!)

• Getting the hands dirty

1. Installing a Mandriva beta or release candidate and reporting to Bugzilla (http://qa.mandriva.com)
2. Feeding Testzilla: (http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/TestZilla)
3. Installing permanently Cooker and maintaining it up to date (reporting bugs and cooperating with Cooker developers by testing patches and giving output)
4. Compiling and packaging some software: a patch to a broken package can be sent to the Cooker mailing-list and to the maintainer (see above how to obtain the list); before that learn about RPM Packaging and to become an expert at RPM read the book Maximum RPM
5. Providing more by uploading packages as a Club Volunteer (look for ideas in the maintainers mailing-list or on the RPM Farm web page here at the Club!)
6. After the skills have been displayed, joining boldly the cooker team by getting an account with a [email protected] (see CookerHowTo above)
7. Subscribe to the maintainers mailing-list (see above)

• Keeping informed in the process
  • Bugzilla (see above) is a good place to start and to learn the basics about the packages, and the etiquette; also all the bugs new and old are listed there
  • Mailing-lists (Changelog and cooker: see Cooker Home above) brings mountains of information
  • And of course -the last but not least- this Wiki!

Ideas to effectively monitor the pulse of the Cooker process

What would be the best measurements to perform in order to get a faithful overview of the cooking activity at Mandriva? Some random ideas…

• Changelog output (new packages/over time)
• Activity on the cooker mailing-list (by packages)
• Bugzilla
• We need to gather information by package, and to track it over time ; groups of packages appear to be a necessity due to the large number of packages ; people could subscribe to a package-wise measurements source (this brings the question of formatting and publishing). See the Cooker Wiki for ongoing discussions.

A step forward

The process can be improved. For example by…

• providing/publishing a TODO list ordered by priority: packagers needing help (time pressure?), developers requesting testing for their patches, but also Club members -or Mandriva users at large- requesting new packages or needed updates.... (there is already this page: http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/PackagingTask and it looks like the Club has already some voting area, it would be nice to display all this information in one location to get an overview of what's happening)
• We need an out-of-date package list somewhere (suggested by WarLy)

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