[fab] Non-standard kernels in the Fedora Multiverse

[Matt Domsch]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 09:47:55AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Well, that should be their (the users') call to make, understanding the 
> risks/rewards for using bits from Alternatives (of CCRMA).

I'm not arguing one way or another here yet, but here's an example of
the "nightmare" I encountered.

MythTV is cool.  ATrpms packages MythTV for Fedora.  Sweet, and it
works fine for me.

Then I want to upgrade from FC4 to FC5.  Dozens of Core packages have
been replaced by versions from ATrpms now.  Even though ATrpms repos
now have FC5 stuff in them, the upgrade was, shall we say, painful?  I
wound up uninstalling as many of the ATrpms packages as I could
(several forcably re-installing an older FC4 version), in order to get
the upgrade to work.  It took *me* 4+ hours (and I think I understand this
better than the average user).  For anyone else, it should have been a
"backup my mythtv database and re-install from scratch" scenario.

Before we go advocating for Alternatives that replace packages from
Core/Extras, I want to really understand the reasoning behind *why*
anything believes the Alternatives packages must exist in the first
place (i.e. what's wrong with the versions already in Core/Extras that
can't be worked around in another fashion besides wholesale
replacement).  Otherwise, we're just encouraging end-user frustration.

-Matt