yum RFE

Karen Pease meme at daughtersoftiresias.org
Wed Oct 18 18:54:20 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 18 October 2006 01:16 pm, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> Jesse, I just don't think it's that simple.
>
> It's easy for us to state, as policy, that "if you wander off the path,
> Fedora will eat your babies."
>
> But *a lot* of people still take that risk when they don't understand the
> risks they're taking.  At all.

But the obvious issue is: why do people take that risk?  It's simple: much of 
what people want doesn't come with Fedora.

Example: Lets look in Amusements/Games.  I have my system set up to have about 
a half dozen repos in addition to Fedora.  Only perhaps a fifth of the games 
listed are from Fedora.  Where's Monsterz?  Where's Nazghul?  Where's 
Crack-attack?  Tong?  Frozen-bubble?  Pingus?  Trackballs?  Liquidwar?  I can 
keep going.

If Fedora had everything/almost everything that people wanted, this wouldn't 
be a problem.  It doesn't.  Licensing and other issues keep them out of the 
distro.  Net result, people use other repos.  Telling them not to use other 
repos is as counterproductive as the recent recommendation to "use the nv 
driver" when the closed-source NVidia driver had a root exploit discovered 
(nv has no GLX, making it turn your high-end video card into a piece of junk 
worthless for most of the reasons that people bought a high-end card and 
installed the closed-source driver to begin with).

I agree that it would be nice if we could rank repos.  Tier one is Core, tier 
two is Extras, and so on from there.  I'd take the recommendation one step 
further and suggest that it not be a web page that lists repos, but a simple, 
packaged script (say, "system-config-repos") that brings up an interface, 
shows you the tiers (and what each one entails), and lets you choose which 
you want to enable.  That would stop all of this hunt-and-peck stuff that 
your average user has to do to configure new repos and find out whether 
they're good or not.

As I said before, I understand the motive behind replacing core packages.  If 
core cannot (say, due to licensing) or will not add in functionality in a 
package that you *need* for your packages, and there's no other reasonable 
way to get it (say, with a plugin), you don't have any good options.  But 
users need to be aware of what repos will do to their system when making the 
decision of what to add to their list, and the current "google for them" 
solution doesn't do that.

  - Karen




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