On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 14:07 -0500, William M. Quarles wrote: > Matthew Miller wrote: > > > On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 05:05:23PM -0500, William M. Quarles wrote: > > > >>>There's been a lot of discussion about this. The points the page makes are > >>>real, and declaring their answer "Microsoft-ish" isn't constructive. Do you > >>>have an alternate *solution*? > >> > >>I do recognize their points, but unfortunately you have failed to > >>recognize mine. In case you didn't notice, my message did point out an > >>alternate *solution*. > > > > Making Fedora Extras a very tiny "outer" core of library packages and not > > try to provide a wide base of packages that all work nicely together? That's > > more "dropping having Fedora Extras" than it is solving the problem of > > repository conflicts. > > Uh, no it isn't. (To go with my previous example) where I get one > version of Xine vs. some different version Xine doesn't really matter > because other packages aren't dependent on it. However, all of the > underlying libraries are carried by multiple repositories and they are > used by multiple programs. If Fedora Core does not have any > applications using those libraries (or other programs that have > dependencies but they aren't really used in Fedora Core), then obviously > they should not be a part of Fedora Core, and thus those are the types > of things that Fedora Extras should carry. Anything more would become > some nightmare of a too big community, like the Roman Empire. In theory you might be right. However, using the name *Fedora Extras* does not make them the best source for packages, and as others have noted, some of their stuff has been known to break core packages. I encountered this myself when trying to do an update with fedora.us as an available repository and it refused because several (20 or more) required a couple of libraries that fedora.us packages were trying to replace. Removing fedora.us from the available repositories fixed the dependency problems. If they were providing the proper QA and verifying that nothing they did would break the core software then their site would be more attractive. I do not use them and do not miss them.
