Repotag

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Fri Mar 16 13:12:03 UTC 2007


On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 01:16:09PM +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> The problem is not a Fedora one. Since Fedora is considered a distribution 
> and the distribution never has a repotag. EPEL is not part of the 
> distribution and therefor does require a repotag to identify where 
> packages come from.

It seems to me that EPEL is meant to be more than 'a community-member
as the other repositories'. I am not saying that it is good or bad, but 
it seems to me that EPEL has the same hegemonic purpose Fedora Extras
once had (and still has). Even though it is distinct from RHEL, it is 
meant to be the only big third party repo. That's my interpretation at 
least.

I am biased toward considering that it is a good idea to have only one
big repo, but I am open to other views. It certainly has pros and cons. 
The main argument in favor of having only one repo is that there is 
less confusion for the users, and less duplication of work. The argument 
against this approach is that the 'design' of the repo may be different, 
and also that it adds competition.

Fedora Extras succeded in some way, since, in my opinion there is a lot
of quality packaging and packagers that have found their way in it,
including Matthias and Axel. The EPEL extension is a proof of that too. 
It didn't completly succeed, however since some packagers are still outside, 
especially you and dries.

Back to the repotag issue, it seems to me to be fair to consider EPEL
to be special and don't need a repotag, based on the fedora extras
success. It would also be fair to treat other repos equally and provide 
a repotag since the fedora extras experience shows that other repos
still coexist. The must, in my opinion, would be a peacefull merge with 
existing repos, packaging quality would certainly improve, and only new 
repos would use repotags, but (sadly in my opinion) history shows that it 
is not that likely to happen.

--
Pat




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