» Packman: switching to new repositories

As I wrote about a couple of days ago, the Packman team has been busy migrating to a new openSUSE Build Service instance as well as, while we were at it, changing the repository layout.

We've been putting quite some steam behind the effort and we finally have reached a point where everything is working great (for us as packagers) and where the most used packages have been added and re-built on our new openSUSE Build Service instance, as well as having been published in our new repositories, including on all our mirrors.

On Wednesday (2011-03-02), in CET evening, we will delete the old repositories. We will create symbolic links to make the old URLs point to the new repositories (e.g. 11.3 to openSUSE_11.3), in order to make the old URLs still work perfectly fine.

But it will also mean that there are a lot of packages that were in the old repositories that are not in the new ones, as we didn't migrate everything yet, and didn't migrate everything on purpose. Indeed, it is also a good opportunity for us to get rid of old cruft which we added many years ago and isn't used by anyone any more, or even anyone in the first place.

At the same time, I will change the list of repositories that show up in YaST's "community repositories" module in order to reflect the new layout, with the option of picking only some of our repositories, and not just the "big one" (for details, please refer to this post). Of course, once performed, I will duly announce it.

So if you do run into a package you were used to get from us and which doesn't show up in the Packman repository any more, please let us know by sending us an email to our mailing-list at packman@links2linux.de (no need to register first, just send an email to that address, in English or German).

Sorry for the inconvenience that move might create, but it will definitely help us because we will hopefully have a little less packages to maintain (because no one is using them), and also make the service a bit swifter for you to use, as there will be less RPM-MD metadata to download on each refresh.