On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:42:45 -0500, William M. Quarles <quarlewm@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Several of the other repositories of which we speak are far from "mini." > They have been around longer and are still more popular than Fedora > Extras. Some have more packages. Most have much better designed and > more sophisticated websites. There main issues... once you let yourself get beyond the heated bloodlust between certain members in the discussion.... is the issue of which world view you think is best long term. And please, you have to take some of the more aggressive statements on both sides in context. The discussion about this has gone on for years now... well before Red Hat decided to name their project "Fedora." The main parties in the debate reached a standoff several eons ago, some of them just haven't realized there comes a point when you have to stop and just agree to disagree, because sometimes perfectly rational people will disagree for perfectly rationale reason. Though I will say, I think too many people are behaving irrationally at this point for continued discussion to be worthwhile. And to dwell on "propaganda"... especially wiki comments that were reworded in an effort to be more considerate..seems a delibrate ploy to keep the issues heated well past the point where its constructive to do so. People make mistakes, people get upset and mispeak, to dwell on this does not move things forward. I personally think it comes down to how you prioritize certain aspects of the issue at hand relative to each other. In essense there are two long term competing world views. Not 3 months from now... not 6 months from now... think fc6 time schedule. Do you want to see as much centralized system into one (or two) repository as possible. Or do you want to see a several competing repositories each with overlap sets of packages as the long term solution? Each has its strengths and weaknesses depending on what solution you are trying to solve. I personally think moving to as much centralization provides a more interesting Fedora Project. I like the idea Micheal Tiemann of Red Hat has express about "Fedora Collections" where in the future once Core and Extras exist in the same build environment you think about opening up the space and having targetted media sets besides just Core, put together from core and extras. I'm also concerned about relying on system made of nearly individual packagers maintaining their own individual repositories and build systems. I'm concerned about what happens if one those individuals can no longer provide packages any longer. Since there is no integrated build system between individual repositories, it might be a significant amount of time for a volunteer to duplicate the build system that repository was using if it goes dark due to an individual maintainers. If an individual maintainer can no longer package in a centralized build system... a volunteer does not need to try to duplicate any of the build infrastructure to come forward and maintain the packages that were orphaned. I have several other reasons why I personally prefer a long term centralized solution, but i would have to say those are my two primary reasons. And i think its important that we all take a moment and think about long term priorities and constraints, instead of getting caught up in the day to day, back and forth debate. Without taking anything away from those people who volunteered their efforts to create large repositories of packages for the general public to use, in the guideline vacuum Red Hat created for add-on packages through the entire RHL period.. i think the long term health of Fedora is best served with as much centralization of package build process as possible moving forward. -jef
