$ zypper info pidgin | grep ‘^Support Level’
Support Level: unknown
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this means in practice?
I’m also curious as to how it is decided what Support Level a package
is given. What’s the logic in the pidgin package having a no support
level whilst pidgin-sipe is Level 3 and pidgin-otr is Level 2? What is
about kmines ("…the classical Minesweeper game where you have to find
mines by logical deduction") that merits Level 3 support?
What got me wondering about this is someone in my organisation pointing
at Secunia advisories from late August relating to pidgin which say you
should update to 2.10.0 and asking me how this affects our Linux
machines. Given that pidgin is included in SLED my initial reaction was
that any updates Novell deem necessary will appear in the Updates
channel. However the version of pidgin included in SLED 11 SP1 is 2.6.6
and last updated in December. Which suggests that maybe Novell aren’t
hugely interested in keeping it up to date. I’m wondering if ‘Support
Level: unknown’ is intended to reflect this.
I would ask Novell directly about this but for reasons unknown that one
of my colleagues is trying to figure out, we haven’t been able to raise
Service Requests for the last week or so.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this means in practice?
I’m also curious as to how it is decided what Support Level a package
is given. What’s the logic in the pidgin package having a no support
level whilst pidgin-sipe is Level 3 and pidgin-otr is Level 2? What is
about kmines (“…the classical Minesweeper game where you have to
find mines by logical deduction”) that merits Level 3 support?
What got me wondering about this is someone in my organisation
pointing at Secunia advisories from late August relating to pidgin
which say you should update to 2.10.0 and asking me how this affects
our Linux machines. Given that pidgin is included in SLED my initial
reaction was that any updates Novell deem necessary will appear in
the Updates channel. However the version of pidgin included in SLED
11 SP1 is 2.6.6 and last updated in December. Which suggests that
maybe Novell aren’t hugely interested in keeping it up to date. I’m
wondering if ‘Support Level: unknown’ is intended to reflect this.
I would ask Novell directly about this but for reasons unknown that
one of my colleagues is trying to figure out, we haven’t been able to
raise Service Requests for the last week or so.
It looks like repository priorities and repository numbers…
If you change the SLE SDK priorities to 100 and re-check.
[/color]
Code:
$ zypper info pidgin | grep ‘^Support Level’
Support Level: unknown
$ zypper info pidgin | grep ‘^Repository’
Repository: sle11sdksp1
On my machine that repo apparently takes precedence over all others.
Code:
$ # zypper lr -P
| Alias | Name | Enabled | Refresh | Priority
—±----------------------------±----------------------------±--------±--------±--------
1 | sle11sdksp1 | sle11sdksp1 | Yes | No | 50
2 | sle11sdksp1_updates | sle11sdksp1_updates | Yes | No | 50
3 | sle11sdksp1_updates_testing | sle11sdksp1_updates_testing | Yes | No | 50
4 | sled11_extras | sled11_extras | Yes | No | 50
5 | sled11_extras_testing | sled11_extras_testing | Yes | No | 50
6 | sled11sp1 | sled11sp1 | Yes | No | 50
7 | sled11sp1_updates | sled11sp1_updates | Yes | No
(and so on)
It looks like the priority of repos with the same Priority number is
decided by an alphanumeric sort of their name.
I changed the Priority number of the sled11sp1 repo to something lower
than 50 and now I get
Code:
$ zypper info pidgin | grep ‘^Support Level’
Support Level: Level 3
$ zypper info pidgin | grep ‘^Repository’
Repository: sled11sp1
I find this interesting. Firstly it’s made me realise that the
Repository line in the output of ‘zypper info’ does not indicate which
repository the packages was installed from. I thought it did, though I
can’t recall how I came to believe that.
Secondly, it doesn’t even necessarily tell you about the package you
have installed. The pidgin package I actually have installed isn’t in
the sled11sp1, it’s in sled11sp1_updates.
Thirdly, I had assumed that the Support Level was information contained
in the package somehow, though I’d been unable to work out how. That it
is determined by which ever repo ‘zypper info’ happens to find a package
by that name in would seem to make it somewhat less useful that perhaps
it ought be. I haven’t changed which pidgin package I have installed,
but by altering a number in a .repo I can make alter what level of
support ‘zypper info’ says applies to it. The pidgin package in the SLED
updates repo and the SLE SDK updates repo are identical (same md5sum) so
that zypper can report than as having different support levels is rather
unhelpful.