Well, /somebody/ has to meet the other one halfway! All that I see on the extras site is that they want us to encourage the /developers/ of the applications or other packages involved to /submit their packages to extras/ for inclusion. Or they encourage /us/ to submit the packages to extras. /Not one word/ do they speak about coordinating their efforts with those of men like Dag and Axel.
Many of the packages in Extras started life as SRPMs from other repos such as Dag's and Axel's. It would be great if Dag & Axel would submit their own packages for inclusion in Extras too.
I'd go along with using extras exclusively, except for one thing: Extras never has had the selection that Dag and Axel have had.
This will change. There are currently (I believe) 100 different people maintaining packages in Extras, and this number is growing. It's only a matter of time before Extras is the single biggest repo in terms of different packages available. However, Dag, Axel et al also maintain packages for non-Fedora distros such as RHEL, and I doubt that Extras will go that way (though I've seen a lot of Extras packages rebuilt for Centos in other places).
> The head of
extras can speak for himself, of course, but the impression I have is that the "quality control" process even to /get/ a package into extras takes longer than the typical release cycle of Fedora.
There's an extensive review process for getting a package into Extras in the first place, but once it's in, changes can be made pretty quickly. In fact the only real holdups are the build system (which is very busy and undergoing some changes at the moment) and the manual package-signing process (which will always be a manual process for safety's sake). Additionally, there's the fedora-extras-commits list (which every Extras maintainer is supposed to be on), where every cvs commit in the entire repository is sent. There's potentially a lot of eyeballs there to spot any mistakes that get introduced, which has to be good.
Extras did surprise me when, the first time I configured my system (back in FC3) to use extras, I got twenty-two updates of packages (like anjuta) that I had installed from dag or at-stable or freshrpms.
I was quite surprised by that too. I maintain my own local repo and there were a fair number of newer versions of those packages in Extras. I no longer bother building the FC3/FC4 versions of my own packages that are in Extras (unless they appear to be not as actively maintained as I'd like :-))
Paul.
