Fedora Extras, Fedora Core CVS Open!

[Tomas Mraz]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 00:46 -0500, Cristian Gafton wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Dec 2004, Dag Wieers wrote:
> > Only fork SPEC files when the complexity of maintaining them becomes
> > harder than the complexity of keeping things synchronised.
> 
> I would say the opposite is true as well: only maintain a complex spec 
> file if the work required to maintain 3 simpler ones is overwhelming. That 
> is because usually, after a release, 90% of the packages are rarely 
> touched again for that release. And having the freedom of changing a spec 
> file in the devel tree without worrying whether it will continue to build 
> on an older release if you ever have to do a security errata speeds up the 
> development - and that is because the older release has its own spec file 
> that it is known to work as of the time that older release shipped.

I think that the problem is clear. Red Hat/Fedora Core have different
goals than independent repositories. The goal of Fedora Core is to have
a stable set of packages for a release which then don't evolve much - we
only fix bugs with security impact or other serious bugs. There aren't
many packages which will get new versions from upstream during the
updates cycle. So there is clearly no need to maintain complex spec
files because the old spec files are good enough and they aren't changed
much except adding patches. And it's clearly better to have forked spec
files to avoid regressions.

That's much different from independent repositories such as Dag's
because they have the goal to deliver packages of new versions of
various software to as many distributions as possible. For this it's
much better to have one spec file with macros.

So the question is, will Fedora Extras be more like independent
repository or more like the Fedora Core. Or it could depend on package.

-- 
Tomas Mraz <tmraz at redhat.com>