On Monday 02 January 2006 16:53, Warren Togami wrote:
Furthermore, I personally consider 3rd party repositories to be forks of
the distribution. In most cases this is no problem if they do not
overlap and do not replace Core/Extras packages.
A "fork" is not necessarily a bad thing. Only users should be aware
that they use such repositories at their own option, and if they have
any problems they need to report it to their fork project/repository to
deal with it. It is not Fedora's responsibility to workaround problems
caused by forks or 3rd party software.
While I agree that it isn't necessarily Fedora's responsibility to play nice
with 3rd-party repositories, I think it ought to be a goal to make using
3rd-party repositories as painless as possible. I think there are quite a few
people who might not use Fedora, if not for the 3rd-party repositories.
If there's a fix or functionality addition to a core package needed for
another package maintained by a 3rd-party, why not push them into the core
versions? Then people who want software out of the 3rd-party repo but don't
want core packages replaced get to have their cake and eat it too, and
3rd-party repositories don't get bashed as much. Everybody wins, no?
Of course, someone within Red Hat would probably have to step up as 3rd-party
repository liaison to coordinate the effort... But I think its something
worth doing, for the sake of the Fedora community at large.