The hard problems with Collections: (Was: tuxracer & chromium move to Extras_

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 10:30:52AM -0400, Tim Daly wrote:
> First, you're still maintaining the concept of Core and Extras.
> That's gone. 

I don't think you can make it go away. I know some people would like to.
What happens beyond the Fedora name is intentionally not Fedora business.
It can't be because as you rightly say Core + Extras will never meet
everyones needs. Some repositories may also be proprietary (eg the 
macromedia flash packages or the nvidia drivers wrapped in rpm format)
and are thus outside of 'Fedora' and the Fedora goals but are still very
very useful to some users. 

When you have too mnany repositories especially of critical stuff you
end up in a gigantic dependancy disaster. That is one reason core has
to be well controlled and why extras is defined in terms of building on
core and extras only. This at least pulls the core libraries into a single
place and form.

Equally the original definition recognized people would want to do things
that broke compatibility with core components and that users should be able
to tell this would happen - Fedora Alternatives being the tag name we used
for such packages. That might be as mundane as a gnome-libs variant with
new features or as significant as using the FreeBSD kernel or Hurd as the
core kernel.

There does seem to be an O(N^lots) co-ordination requirement between main
repositories and we must be careful of that. Maybe Conary will, once half
of it has stopped being armwaved, solve that.

Alan