EPEL report 2007, week 19

[Axel Thimm]

On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 09:50:09AM -0700, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> Yeah, I understand that. No offense people, but after reading some of
> the recurring threads I was ready to go jump out of the nearest window. 

I hope that you live on the ground floor :)

> Given the previous threads I personally don't have much hope that
> repotags will be ever accepted by the Fedora community

be careful: don't confuse the whole community with a couple of people
sitting behind the steering wheel. fpc had signaled that they would
pass any decision of epel to introduce repotags and fesco couldn't
care less, they don't like the idea of repotags (especially from their
non-rhel pov), but they wouldn't veto any such decision either.

In fact I would argue that the Fedora and - what's more important in
this context - the RHEL community were quite accustomed and happy with
repotags.

But repotags have a very week point: It takes one player to taint the
system.

> and regretfully I don't have any magical political solution to the
> problem - it does look to me that most of the objections are
> political in nature.

Well, for what it's worth the repotag issue was never introduced in any
non-political way. It is the way that repos used to visually mark
their packages like marking cattles. They don't produce more or less
milk either, but when a cattle breaks free and stampedes your meadow
to dirt you know what farmer to blame.

Same for packages. It was never a "technical" issue that Dag's repotag
"dag" was higher than ATrpms' "at". Neither that "rf" was higher that
"ccrma" and so on. These "technical" arguments are rather lame, and if
the people having these arguments really belived in them, they would
in fact want a repotag of "zzz_my_repo". There are no technical
benefits or drawbacks with repotags.

So it started by politics (a common request of many existing and to
become software repos for RHEL) and ended with politics (epel
effectively rejecting to play along). And even hiding behind being a
homo faber, e.g. ignoring all but technical sides of any issue, is
already a political statement. There is nothing wrong with politics
per se, it would just had been nice if politics would had been layed
out into nice inter-repo cooperation.

Instead we now have the same political rift that Fedora itself had 3
years ago. Fedora's rifts are still not completely healed, let's see
how long it will take until epel vs the rest of world rifts start to
heal. It is just sad to see the exact same mistakes recurring
again. And even sader it is to be in the middle of it again.

Anyway, Nando, as much as I personally liked and promoted repotags,
it's currently more promising to beat a dead horse than to get epel to
consider repotags, after all epel already voted on this and nothing
has changed since. So I wouldn't invest too much time into this, if I
were you, because you will just burn out as the rest of us. I know I
burnt out now for the umpteenth time. :/
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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