[Fedora-packaging] Repotag in EPEL

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sunday 18 March 2007, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>
> I (and some other EPEL SIG members afaics) don't care much about using
> one or not. But afaics the use of a repotag is unwanted in Fedora-land
> up to now afaics.
>
> If the answer from the PC is "yes, EPEL is free to use a repotag" then
> please decide how to actually use it -- Add a "repotag" macro defined by
> the buildsys or overload %{dist}, ...

My .02€: as a user of an enterprise distro, using several repos which ship the 
same software in slightly different packages is most definitely something I 
wouldn't do (at least without actively taking care of overlaps myself eg. 
with explicit per-repo exclusions/inclusions in depsolver configs, and 
accepting the blame if it blows up on me).  Repotag seems to encourage such 
repo mixing somewhat, which is why I'm slightly leaning against it.  Or put 
another way, I really don't care because I think if I'm in a situation where 
repotags between repos start to matter at all, I should sanity check my setup 
before doing anything else.

But if there is a "repotag", it needs to be placed in the release tag in a way 
that it doesn't affect version comparisons between package releases (within a 
repo).  Just defining %{dist} eg. as .elX.epel wouldn't work as %{dist} is 
optional, but defining eg. %{repo} and making its usage rules the same 
as %{dist}'s (except if dist is there too, repo needs to come directly 
appended to it) could work.