Re: [Cooker] Some questions about Mandriva

[Adam Williamson <awilliamson@mandriva.com>]

On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 14:33 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:

> Only Free (as in speech) software can be in the main distribution (in
> the release, updates, testing and backports media) and if there are any
> other important applications (e.g. nvidia/ati drivers, ipw daemons and
> firmware etc.) then they go into non-free media. This way it is very
> easy to know how Free the distro on the whole is and to give yourself a
> fully Free install just by ignoring the relevant media.

Bad and confusing terminology.

There are three *sections* in the Mandriva tree for a given release:

main
contrib
non-free

each of these sections is split into four *repositories*:

release
updates
testing
backports

which have the roles previously discussed.

main contains free software that is officially supported (i.e. we
guarantee security updates) in official releases. contrib contains free
software (i.e. we don't guarantee security updates) in official
releases. non-free contains non-free software. It's supposed to be
officially supported but this currently rather an 'honored in the
breach' situation.

a 'media' is, technically speaking, the representation of a repository
on a particular system, but I try and avoid the term entirely of late as
people generally don't understand it.
-- 
adamw