Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Les Mikesell]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>> Yes, but now we are back to the fact that the jpackage ones didn't 
>> conflict with anything until fedora started including conflicting 
>> ones, so it seems in bad taste to blame the third party. 
> 
> I didn't blame anyone. Just stated facts.

Same here.  No conflicts existed until fedora packagers duplicated 
packages that already existed in well-known repositories and forked them 
instead of mirroring.

> Sorry if that sounds
>> insulting, but that's just the way it looks from outside.  If there 
>> was some big effort made to avoid this problem and it proved to be 
>> impossible, I must have missed the reasons.
> 
> You did despite it being explained to you several times. There are major 
> software components like Openoffice.org and Eclipse that depends on 
> Java.

Which still doesn't explain why any needed package that existed 
elsewhere couldn't be maintained identically to eliminate the conflict 
issue.  Maybe there's a case of that somewhere but I'm not convinced it 
would have been a problem in general.  Would jpackage really have 
refused to have the same maintainer make sure common packages were 
always identical?

> Excluding all the software just because they are in a third party 
> repository is impossible.

It doesn't have to be excluded, it has to not be a conflicting fork.

> I will the end the discussion here since you 
> seem to be going in circles.

The reason this discussion always goes in circles is that there are 2 
factors involved and you always jump between one or the other in your 
answers, ignoring the fact that users have to deal the the end result.

Factor 1 is that the fedora repo doesn't include everything that the 
pre-existing repositories provided and users still need.  Whenever this 
comes up you respond about legalities/policy etc., etc., but the reasons 
don't matter.   The fact is they aren't there.  This shouldn't be an 
issue, since the other repos are still around, but...

Factor 2 is that _some_ of the packages from the 3rd party repos were 
forked into potentially conflicting versions that may cause problems 
with the original, while factor 1 ensures that you can't get all of the 
packages you are likely to need without them.  And a side effect seems 
to be that the old repos are no longer particularly interested in 
supporting fedora.

If you can't address the effects of both factors at once, I guess there 
really isn't anything else to say.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com