EPEL report 2007, week 19

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano nando at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Sat May 19 18:06:15 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 20:02 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> 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 :)

Don't worry, I can hopefully resist the rige :-)

> > 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.

Sorry, I did not mean to do that, there have been voices of support, of
course. But those opposed do speak for the community (whatever that is)
and they have the wheel. 

> 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.

That particular one not even qualifies as an "argument" (IMHO), it can
be disproved as a problem in a few lines - reductio ad absurdum - if the
person at the other end is listening (and that's the problem). 

For the record, the only "technical issue" that I felt was technical in
the list I wrote about was technical issues with respect to how to
implement this in the build system. The rest are non-technical from my
point of view (they are wishful thinking, or distractions from the issue
at hand, just plain bad logic or criticism about the quality of the
solution with no concrete plans for a better alternative - except for
the suggestion of somehow using the pgp signatures for that purpose). 

[MUNCH]
> 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. 

Yup, I know. Don't worry, I don't _have_ that much time to invest :-)
When I see an email asking about this issue I'll try to answer (if there
is anything to say and I have time to say it), if I see objections I'll
do my best to answer them (I already did that a couple of times and
there were no responses to my answers). That's it...

-- Fernando





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