Questions about some default packages Fedora project

[Warren Togami]

On Sat, 2003-11-01 at 20:56, Didier Casse wrote:
> Hi,
>    I'm new at this Fedora concept and I would like to ask the following
> questions:
> 
> 1. How come we only have a limited number of Window Managers in Fedora?
> i.e only (GNOME, KDE and twm)

I don't know the actual reason, but my guess is that the window managers
and desktop environments were simplified to a minimal set in order to
reduce the engineering load for the previous paid engineer hour
distribution that was Red Hat Linux.

With limited engineers and far too much work to do of much higher
importance (i.e. NPTL, XFree86 drivers and a thousand other things), you
simply cannot expect something like enlightenment to get the necessary
time and care needed for a quality package.  KISS principles rule when
resources are limited. 

> 
> Why don't we include more robust or eye-candy desktops such as Fluxbox,
> Enlightenment, XFCE, etc... ?

Now that Fedora is moving toward community involvement in engineering,
packaging, quality assurance, we can package these things.  For
fedora.redhat.com package submission is not ready, so you can submit
packages to fedora.us to begin the community driven package acceptance
process.

I believe fluxbox is already submitted, or may already be published at
fedora.us.

> 2. If we have created some of our own programs, for instance I created
> pdfmerge/pdfmerge4unix (program which merges any number of pdf files),
> [I know it's a small thing but it was just an example! ;-p]
> which is on SF.net, and I wish to make it available to the Fedora
> project/users since it's a useful program. Where do I submit my rpm
> packages to?
> 
> Is it possible to make it available to apt-repositories of Fedora?
> 

RH dislikes the idea of putting apt pkglists on official mirrors because
they do not ship apt.  I personally am unhappy about this, however I
accept their decision.

In the future there may be a resolution to this problem.  Currently yum,
apt, and up2date developers are working on standardizing a header format
so all three clients use the same metadata.  That way it doesn't matter
what client you use, they are all officially supported by all mirrors. 
I don't know the status of this development though.

> 3. Why don't we have a lot of packagers available at hand compared to
> Debian? I think all of you are aware that the apt of Debian covers a wider
> range of packages than Fedora/RH.

http://www.fedora.us/wiki/PackageSubmissionQAPolicy
Fedora Project needs to create our own community of packagers.  Read
this and get started by doing the Self-Introduction post.  Then look at
many examples of other people's package submissions, then submit your
own packages.

http://www.fedora.us/QA
Look here to see all current packages that are in QA.  We need more
people to do quality QA analysis for these packages to become published.

> 
> Debian also have several maintainers which takes care of all their
> packages issues. Why don't we have the same concept in Fedora?
> 

What do you mean by "packages issues"?

Warren