On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Michael Schwendt wrote: > On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 12:48:12 +1100, Colin Charles wrote: > > > Don't forget to add a link to > > 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. > > The Fedora.us project has made a decision that we cannot guarantee > compatibility with other repositories because it is unmaintainable for > these reasons: > > * The only way to avoid package conflicts when using multiple > repositories is to completely avoid publishing packages that > somebody else packages. This is obviously not an option because it > would be too limiting for the Fedora project. 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. You don't have to "avoid publishing packages that somebody else packages". You could have worked together with existing packagers to offer the same packages. This is one way of doing it, there are others that could have worked. With RPMforge this is what our goal is, merge all the SPEC files, take the best of what we have, allow multiple packagers to work together on the single SPEC file, make this SPEC file work for multiple distributions (fedora, red hat, yellow dog, aurora, caos) and for multiple architectures (i386, x86_64, alpha, ppc, sparc) and allow people to publish the same packages that result from the same SPEC files. And we have some new ideas being implemented to allow to build (cross distribution) communities around specific set of packages. This is not limited to only Fedora and only i386 and we operate with fewer people than fedora.us, which is something that we hope to address too if we have the proper tools for that. No conflicts, complete compatibility and cooperation. This is what fedora.us could have done, but they decided to take another path. That's fine with me, but that's why there are now 2 different camps and that's why I think the FAQ has a very limited and twisted scope. And I think that page is the main reason why there never has been a debate what would be best. It prohibited it. > * Coordination among two or more repositories for compatibility would > be far too difficult and incur much greater overhead. Updates would > often involve multiple repository owners working in coordinated > development and simultaneous publishing in order to prevent user > breakage. This is a huge amount of extra development overhead. Isn't that what Open Source is about ? Besides why would there be more overhead than say having 5 people work on a SPEC file using bugzilla. You have to agree on things too and work on policies and procedures. If you avoid any of that, you avoid the most important questions that you should ask as a group of packagers. I think the paragraph exagerates the overhead, but of course as a newcomer fedora.us would have had to worked with others which is harder than executing your own plan. If you look at the limited resources we have and what we've achieved in less than 2 years time I don't think the overhead you mentioned is hardly a valid argument. > * 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. But working together means you have to agree before taking a next step, and you can't take big steps in one time. 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. > For anyone, who seeks for comments from fedora.us leadership, fedora-devel-list > might be much more suitable. I'm no longer seeking comments from fedora.us leadership :) I'm just hoping some of my rhetoric rings a bell and may change things for the better. I'm interested to hear other's opinion about it, the answer may come from an outsider. -- dag wieers, dag@xxxxxxxxxx, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
