My thoughts on repotag

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Rex Dieter wrote:

> Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > Then the question is: why is Fedora creating EPEL packages?
> > Why does Fedora mandate CentOS and not the other way around ?
> 
> Fedora is creating EPEL packages because there exist acommunity of
> packagers/maintainers who want to do it and an infrastructure to enable that.
> 
> No one is mandating anything to anyone.
> 
> Point blank: If epel does do repotags, will you participate in epel?  Or are
> there other blockers for you?

The repotag is not blocking me at all, but is necessary to allow multiple 
repositories to work together. Without it, it becomes harder to track were 
problems are coming from.

I've discussed a few of the blockers we have to join EPEL (which are 
mostly related to how we build, what one is allowed to do with SPEC files 
and what policies there are for maintaining them). And Karanbir made some 
others (from CentOS) at FOSDEM to Tom Callaway.

I'm not refusing to work with EPEL flat out (if I were, I wouldn't be on 
this list), but I wouldn't be as productive with the current Fedora 
guidelines. I have had quite a few discussions with Matthias concerning 
this and I question the forking of SPEC files (for different dists, think 
RHEL2.1, RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5), the implementation of macros the way it 
is done with Fedora and the maintainership/ownership of SPEC files as done 
with Fedora.

If I were to join, I bet all of these will bring in fierce discussions and 
since CentOS hasn't made a formal decision (mostly because CentOS5 is 
taking up all resources) I don't know what to do. Fact is that RPMforge as 
it is will end as soon as there is an alternative. Which at this point I 
don't think there is.

And whetever EPEL decides to do, there will always be other requirements 
from other people (latest and greatest vs. stable and back-ported). So I 
doubt that whatever hole EPEL is going to fill and whatever hole CentOS 
is going to fill, other repositories will exist to fill other holes that 
EPEL doesn't do. And that means upgrading EPEL packages.

Even with EPEL and CentOS I might still have another repository with 
recent versions of certain packages and these also have to coexist with 
whatever there is.

Whatever your use case is, other people have other requirements and you 
cannot have a one-fit-all repository. EL is not only the server, there's 
also the desktop and also the appliance worlds that need stable or 
bleeding edge packages. 

And I consider RPMforge bleeding edge and it's up to the user or 
administrator to make intelligent decisions.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]