Relationship to existing 3rd party repos/CentOS/SL?

[Axel Thimm]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 02:04:44PM +0100, Tim Jackson wrote:
> You & Axel appear to be implying that you removing repotags is some kind 
> of threat, which is going to teach a lesson to some of the people who 
> opposed it in EPEL.

Autsch (or Ouch?), I never threaten anyone, I'm against arms and I'm a
vegetarian. ;)

The ugly thing about repotags is that it is a global decision. Either
all repo use it, or it makes no sense to use it, and in fact is even
harmfull if you are the last repo using it. That's why the request for
maintaining the unpolluted no-repotag RHEL namespace was important.

Freshrpms started by not using the repotag (I don't know the reason,
but I suspect it was when Matthias changed his buildsystem, at least I
think that's what he wrote back then), and it started to rain bug
reports that ATrpms would replace "Fedora's" libquicktime and ffmpeg,
and for these I knew I didn't have to check whether Fedora has such
packages, but the users are not aware of what packages have patent
issues in the U.S. and which don't.

But I didn't know which repo did contain these incompatible packages
and at the beginning I had to ping-pong with the frustrated users
until I found out which repo was doing it and until they understood
that ATrpms was *not* replacing Fedora Core packages ...

So EPEL is not the first to drop repotags, but the first to do so in
the RHEL namespace. Until now the no-repotag namespace was reserved
for RHEL and all repos respected this by tagging their packages. Now
this simple scheme is gone, and as much as I'm a proponent of
repotags, I will certainly not be the one that get's the bug rain for
"replacing" RHEL-assumed packages.

Simply said: The no-repotag decision is inflicting pain onto other
repos and they will have to follow EPEL's "lead" into this state,
whether they like it or not. But that's rather self-explained,
discussed a miriad times on this list, and was known to all people
that voted.

No threats and it's not going to teach anyone a lesson, neither a
constructive or a negative one, it is just creating user and repo
frustration and rifts between the existing repos and RHEL communities
and the upcoming EPEL community. No win-win, just lose-lose.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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