Submitting packages

[Gerard Milmeister]

Michael,

Thanks for clearifying.
It may probably a good idea to put a little more information on this on
the Fedora home page, so that potential contributors know what to
expect.
As for the QA process, it is clear that this should be strict. However I
wouldn't agree with arguments like "Do we really need that?" or "Why
three Prolog implementations, one should be enough". For the Fedora Core
this policy is the right one, but the future extras should include any
packages that might be of interest. This does not mean, however, that
any shell script, that someone has written, should be packaged.
Yes, most packages WILL have a special target group, but programming
languages like Haskell and SML are not special purpose. I wish for
Fedora to become a dominant distribution in the educational and research
area.
>From the original Fedora FAQ:
"Fedora will forever put an end to incompatibilities due to repository
mixing by eventually including all possible software."
While this is an ideal probably impossible to achieve, I think it is a
worthwhile goal, and the merger with the Redhat project, raised my hope
that it could be actually achieved.
Anyway, I will from time to time submit packages to Fedora, and look
forward to the moment, where I install a fresh copy of Fedora and simply
use up2date to install one of the packages, I myself contributed.
(I hope the extras repository is included by default on a fresh install,
not as something that users may find out to use from hearsay, otherwise
it would not be much different from freshrpms and others)
A further point: with a large repository, I think becomes necessary to
extend the official application groups for rpm. Where should I but a
computer algebra package, when there is not group called
Application/Mathematics, for example. Maybe a naming convention more
than 2 deep would also help.

I look forward to a bright future :-)

Regards
-- 
Gérard Milmeister
Tannenrauchstrasse 35
8038 Zürich
gemi at bluewin.ch