RPM submission procedure

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004 00:34:22 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:

> We believe in diversity and while we all joined fedora.us a year ago,

Joining a mailing-list is not equal to joining fedora.us.

Joining fedora.us is what I've had hoped some of the existing packagers
would be interested in.

However, the list archives of fedora-devel at fedora.us between November 2002
and April 2003 contain many political discussions and no real signs of
the packagers wanting to merge into an open community project. 

The archives are pretty tiresome to read with all the debates about making
fedora.us adapt existing packaging practise instead of working on improved
guidelines for a single source of extra packages (well, except for
packages with patenting and licencing issues).

IMO, there has never been an interest in collaborating on truely
authoritative packages. Instead, the old competition of who pushes out an
update package first continues, and it is tried to cover the true
motivation behind that with arguments like "diversity is good", even if
the only differences between two given packages are insufficient build
dependencies, wrong dependencies or a file being included in a different
sub-package. 

In reality, what those individual repository maintainers want is total
control about their own packages and, of course, continueing to run their
own branded repositories with fame and glory in mind.

Official Fedora Extras gives the chance to redo some of the pre fedora.us
discussions. And yet again, some of the individual repo maintainers showed
interest only in repository inter-operability or avoiding modification to
their packages inflicted by changes in Fedora Core, e.g. /etc/redhat-release
detection or package release distribution tags.

> believing the project would serve as a coordinating entity,

With individual repository maintainers not being willing to compromise
that has turned out to become impossible or *very* time-consuming. While
fedora-devel at fedora.us would still be discussing subtleties, the
individual repo maintainers would continue to pipe out packages without
prior community reviews and approvals.

> Anyway the current setup of heretic repos is working quite
> well. Become a heretic yourself today! ;)

Except for package conflicts which the ordinary user encounters easily
when he tries to mix freshrpms and ATrpms.

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