On 17/01/2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Michael Schwendt wrote: > > > The burden > > of avoiding repository compatibility problems is on the 3rd party > > packagers' shoulders. > > I'd call this a recipe for disaster, You misunderstood. It's not a recipe, it's the situation we're still in. > given the facts that (a) a very > large number of packages were available in 3rd party repositories long > before the fedora project even existed, Which is what I've said, too (except that there's also a flow of packages in the opposite direction). But neither are all these packages up to the Fedora Packaging guidelines, nor does Joe Packager know about all of them when submitting a new Fedora package for review. Nobody would like a policy that said "here's a list of 3rd party repos, go through the list and see whether any of the repos contains your package -- if it does, make sure your own possibly derived package never becomes incompatible with the 3rd party repo's package for as long as you maintain it in Fedora". It would be kind of limiting and would also create a bottle-neck if a single 3rd party packager needed to sign off changes in a Fedora package. > > Unless you manage to get Fedora packagers to > > monitor 3rd party repositories, some of which they may not even have > > heard of before. > > Exactly, and that just doesn't happen. Is it just that I know more > about the RPM situation or is this better organized over in the .deb world? Debian and Ubuntu try to offer "everything" in their official repos. Still there are so many unofficial repos, I have doubts they all work together always. It's very likely that some of them are even mutually exclusive, e.g. see a long list at: http://www.apt-get.org/main.php
