Relationship to existing 3rd party repos/CentOS/SL?

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano nando at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Wed Apr 25 21:51:50 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 20:26 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:14:14AM -0700, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 11:49 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 01:04:49PM -0700, C.M. Connelly wrote:
> > > > Speaking as an end-user/sysadmin, I'm not clear on why the repotag
> > > > issue is as controversial as it appears to be.
> > > > 
> > > > From my perspective, RHEL (really mostly CentOS) is the base OS.
> > > > On top of that, I expect to layer EPEL packages, very likely some
> > > > packages from RPMForge, and packages from my own local repos (for
> > > > special needs or for packages that just aren't (and maybe can't
> > > > be) available from other sources).
> > > > 
> > > > Having read all the messages on the topic, I agree that the
> > > > current EPEL steering committee is not out to take over the world
> > > > or *intends* to imply that other repositories are less important,
> > > > but I can definitely see how Axel and Dag can *feel* like that's
> > > > where the committee is coming from, because that's how it feels to
> > > > me.
> > > 
> > > It is more than a bad feeling. If one repo drops repotags the whole
> > > repotag system is broken. So the continued lack of repotags forces the
> > > other repos to follow along even though they are strong belivers of
> > > repotags.
> > > [MUNCH]
> > 
> > I don't get this. 
> > 
> > If one repo drops repotags (or a newcomer does not adopt them as this
> > seems to be the case to me :-), then that repo does not have repotags.
> > So? That does not force anyone to drop them to match their choice. If
> > there is just _one_ repo that does not use repotags then the "system"
> > still works, anything without repotags belongs to that repo, if more
> > repos do that then things get progressively more confusing. If/when I
> > package for rhel I will keep using ".ccrma" in there. 
> 
> freshrpms recently dropped repotags. 

Ah, oh, yes... the "let's make a bigger mess of things" reaction (IMHO).
So, am I making things worse if I decide to keep repotags? (because then
I don't contribute so strongly to the predictable confusion that some
hope will highlight how repotags can be useful for no additional
cost?[*]). Sounds really really silly to me. 

Thanks for taking the time to answer in detail...
-- Fernando

[*] it is not a "solution", but it sure helps. A lot. 


> Ever since for the packages that
> atrpms and freshrpms share I get reports like "why does atrpms replace
> ffmpeg and lame from the official Fedora Core distribution". I have
> these in bugzilla, atrpms list, fedora lists and pm.
> 
> For users knowledgable about what Fedora can contain or not, this is
> less an issue, but all the novice, incomplete reports (which are a
> supporters nightmare) make it to the nice playing party.
> 
> As it doesn't only affect 3rd party repos cross-relationship, but even
> the relationship to the vendor itself. E.g. EPEL packages become
> indistinguishable for RHEL packages and I bet that there will be
> tickets opened against RHEL because the user thought that
> foo-1.2.3-4.el5 breaking in presence of bar-1.2.3-4.el5 is a problem
> of foo, while after wasting RHEL support time it will be discovered
> that while foo is indeed from RHEL, bar was from EPEL and the whole
> constallation was unsupported to begin with.
> 
> But the latter only affects the relationship of EPEL to RHEL.





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