Yum repo compatibility

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 16:05:00 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers wrote:

> > > http://www.fedora.us/wiki/RepositoryMixingProblems
> > 
> > That page also explains why fedora.us cannot guarantee compatibility with
> > other repositories, quoted below for completeness and as food for
> > discussion. The paragraph is unchanged since April 25th, 2003.

> Since fedora.us started without any packages and there were already a 
> number of existing repositories with a good amount of packages. The 
> fedora.us policy could have been to work together with existing 
> repositories and implement something that could have worked.

Sorry that I won't participate in going back to very old threads from
fedora-devel at fedora.us list, which were not fruitful. It's beyond my
time. The list archives are still open. Everybody is free to skim over
the several hundred relevant messages and look at the problem. Okay, I
added my comments in this thread, but that's just because I'm subscribed
to this list.

There are a very few people (or maybe it's just one) who don't realize
that I'm just a contributor. I'm not in charge of the policies and
objectives. I'm not a fedora.us spokesman either. Gah! It's insane to
think that, when I never ever claimed to be a spokesman. Fedora.us
provides a system which allows community commitment, where I, as a member
of the community, can contribute. Other contributors have noticed the
possibility, too. On the contrary, when fedora.us was started, and even
many months later, no other packaging project was ready to accept
community commitment beyond private mails or mailing-lists.

An environment, where competition between repositories dominates and
crushes any attempts at working towards a higher common goal, is hostile
instead of beneficial. Do we all have the same goal with extra packages?
No, we don't. Not even with common libraries, I've been told. I understand
that e.g. Matthias Saou didn't want to "give up" freshrpms.net in favour
of maintaining his packages as part of a project that started as "Fedora
Linux". But as could be read on the old fedora-devel list, the other
contributors did not see a way to base their project on packages from an
external repository, packages which are out of their control.

> >     * Users may also have any arbitrary mix of repositories, creating an
> >       unsupportable testing nightmare.
> 
> Which is only true if you have 5 SPEC files resulting in 5 packages, as I 
> said there are other ways to reach the same goal and we've opted to have a 
> single SPEC file resulting (if necessary) into 5 packages. The next step 
> obviously is to look at why we still need 5 packages and how to merge the 
> lot.

Why not take the route of Fedora Extras and extend Fedora Core with add-on
packages, which to use as foundation for even more packages? A single
easy-to-find place where to get extra packages instead of a multitude of
repositories around the world. A single repository which CD manufacturers
can mirror and burn onto CD/DVD. A single repository which to include and
support directly from within Fedora Core. Why have many 3rd party
repositories, which first extend Fedora Core and then extend eachother?
Why not create Fedora Extras and then add complementry, special purpose
3rd party repositories, which depend on it?

> I'm sure fedora.us, now that it has packages and is maturing, is working
> at a slower pace than at the beginning. You can't just change direction
> anymore if you have a large userbase.

IMHO, the situation hasn't changed at all. The total number of package
developers has increased. There are still new submissions added to the
package requests queue. But the general willingness to adhere to the
policies/guidelines and make _utilisable contributions_ (reviews,
approvals, packages which don't fail to build) is still missing. The
interest in getting packages accepted and included is there. But the
willingness to team up with other developers is missing.

-- 
Fedora Core release 2 (Tettnang) - Linux 2.6.9-1.2_FC2
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