And they have the problems to deal with. If someone is upgrading, then they will have to change with the distribution to do the upgrade. I was talking to an admin this week that did the upgrade path and decided to do a full rebuild. Guess what, it was different than the upgrade. Different applications and more applications than via the upgrade path.On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 09:47, Robin Laing wrote:
The real problem is that the 3rd party repositories (freshrpms, DAG, etc.) existed long before the fedora project, providing updates for RH versions that otherwise would have required a subscription to obtain automatically along with additional packages. Then the fedora repository used different conventions. If the 3rd party sites change conventions, their existing users will at best have to download everything touched again and at worst, have broken systems.
I do agree with you to a point.
But with a new release (FC4), why not support the newer version as the main site.
There are systems around that have been 'yum upgrade'ed from a RH 7.x base. It's not supported or recommended, but people have their reasons for doing it.
Any third party site could (should) work with the distribution method of the release and work as seamlessly as possible. They should also try to work together as some are so they don't duplicate packages and/or their packages are mutually compatible.
That implies a single point of control, which can't really happen and would not be a good thing if it did.
I didn't state a single point of control. I stated that they should work together. We would all love that.
This is one area that I have not dealt with to this level. Of course that is the users choice and should be well documented on the repo site. I have fought this in the past where I could not install a security update due to repo differences and left with only the option to use force or nodeps to get around the problem. This is one area where Gentoo works better. The site should still work with the Fedora BASE flawlessly.
It is a pain to install from one repository only to find that you cannot update from a different repository or even from the fedora core site. This is one of those issues about multiple repositories that has burned me. No site should require the installation of a package that prevents the upgrading from another site.
Agreed, but what if a package you want needs a core library rebuilt with different compile options that make it incompatible with other packages.
Thinking about this more makes the idea of extras a nice option to support more customization.
In general, I prefer the move to Extras as it makes it easier for a basic install. Then use yum or preferred method to install the packages wanted.
As long as nothing needs conflicting options and the contents you want have no legal questions in any location...
Now I feel that the Extras will be fully compliant with the base and that to me isn't an issue. I did look and see that some applications that were part of FC1 are not in FC4 and this affects me. I will have to either find another repository for these applications as RPM or compile them myself.
There will always be those issues of who has control and sets the different options required. If the Fedora Project sticks to the standard set by Fedora and ensure that they work together then there should be no problem. It isn't that the Extras are a different project.
I may be wrong but I feel that the separation to extras will work better than not.
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Robin Laing
