Fedora needs more evangelism for repositories

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 13:47:44 -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:

> Brad Smith wrote:
> > Thanks for the thoughtful comments, though I think they would be
> > better made as individual emails to the people that run these sites. I
> 
> True, but there are a lot of one man efforts that don't go anywhere, so 
> I'd like to get some feedback from others in the fedora community on 
> this topic.

Often these "one man efforts" are due to personal preferences, such as
full control over the published content and the release-cycle, and
specific personal goals, such as being the administrator/lead of a project
rather than just a contributor. That's why there are multiple fedora
forums and other fedora related websites, not seldomly with only few
visitors or registered users. Someone who starts an own show probably
wants to perform better (with regard to content or page impressions) or
just get a piece of the cake, regardless of how small it is.

If I were the author of a howto/tutorial, I would seek contact with the
Fedora Documentation project. And if that didn't yield anything
productive, I would try to contribute to one of the existing sites,
e.g. fedoranews.org. However, if an established group of Fedora
contributors quality-controlled contributed articles there, they would
likely refuse publishing something which recommends 'rpm --force'
installation of packages or working as root for regular tasks. And then
someone, who still wants to release instructions which worked for him,
might be stubborn enough to publish the article on an own website and
advertize it in one of the many message boards. Archives and search
engines then do the rest.

> Package: *
> Pin: release l=Fedora Extras, a=stable
> Pin-Priority: 1850
> 
> If package abc is in "Fedora Extras" and any other repository, it will 
> only use the "Fedora Extras" package.  This should keep repository 
> mixing from happening for the most part.

It doesn't know about dependencies though, does it? So, you would still
satisfy the dependencies of package X from repo A with packages Y and Z
from repo B. And exactly that is an untested and unsupported configuration
and one of the dangers of mixing repositories.