Re: Yum repros wanted

[Paul Howarth <paul city-fan org>]

Temlakos wrote:
> Well, /somebody/ has to meet the other one halfway! All that I see on 
> the extras site is that they want us to encourage the /developers/ of 
> the applications or other packages involved to /submit their packages to 
> extras/ for inclusion. Or they encourage /us/ to submit the packages to 
> extras. /Not one word/ do they speak about coordinating their efforts 
> with those of men like Dag and Axel.

Many of the packages in Extras started life as SRPMs from other repos 
such as Dag's and Axel's. It would be great if Dag & Axel would submit 
their own packages for inclusion in Extras too.

> I'd go along with using extras exclusively, except for one thing: Extras 
> never has had the selection that Dag and Axel have had.

This will change. There are currently (I believe) 100 different people 
maintaining packages in Extras, and this number is growing. It's only a 
matter of time before Extras is the single biggest repo in terms of 
different packages available. However, Dag, Axel et al also maintain 
packages for non-Fedora distros such as RHEL, and I doubt that Extras 
will go that way (though I've seen a lot of Extras packages rebuilt for 
Centos in other places).

> The head of
> extras can speak for himself, of course, but the impression I have is 
> that the "quality control" process even to /get/ a package into extras 
> takes longer than the typical release cycle of Fedora.

There's an extensive review process for getting a package into Extras in 
the first place, but once it's in, changes can be made pretty quickly. 
In fact the only real holdups are the build system (which is very busy 
and undergoing some changes at the moment) and the manual 
package-signing process (which will always be a manual process for 
safety's sake). Additionally, there's the fedora-extras-commits list 
(which every Extras maintainer is supposed to be on), where every cvs 
commit in the entire repository is sent. There's potentially a lot of 
eyeballs there to spot any mistakes that get introduced, which has to be 
good.

> Extras did surprise me when, the first time I configured my system (back 
> in FC3) to use extras, I got twenty-two updates of packages (like 
> anjuta) that I had installed from dag or at-stable or freshrpms.

I was quite surprised by that too. I maintain my own local repo and 
there were a fair number of newer versions of those packages in Extras. 
I no longer bother building the FC3/FC4 versions of my own packages that 
are in Extras (unless they appear to be not as actively maintained as 
I'd like :-))

Paul.