video in the desktop

[Michael Schwendt]

[my reply is somewhat off-topic because you address a general problem]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:37:04 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

> Also, for the fedora.us people - what should we do when wanting to
> provide theora to pre-FC2 ? Theora requires a 1.1 version of ogg - does
> that mean that everything we build for FC1 and older that wants to use
> theora has to go in patches ?

Yes, provided that the "patches" repository is continued. But I doubt it
is.

The "patches" repository is located at the root of the extras tree
together with the "pending" repository. It's not included in the yum/apt
config files as an entry which is disabled by default. Hardly any users
know that it exists at all.

Only few packages have been released into it to fix a few bugs in Red Hat
Linux (and later Fedora Core 1) for which no official errata had been
published, e.g. RPM. The FC2 "patches" repository is empty.

The "patches" repository is trouble-some. Any extra packages which depend
on it, must go into "patches", too, in order to not break any dependencies
in the normal extras repositories. But stuff in "patches" can depend on
extra packages. This is a mess unless the "patches" repository were
advertized more. Then again, bugs in Fedora Core should be fixed with
official updates, not with unofficial ones. Raises the question what to do
when software in Fedora Core needs a version upgrade so extra packages
could be built against it?


How about opening up a "Fedora Alternatives" repository at fedora.us
instead? If "Alternatives" are permitted to replace or conflict with
packages in Fedora Core, is it also possible to update/upgrade packages in
Fedora Core? 

http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/terminology.html

That would give us more flexibility in preparing and testing software
which could not be built against Fedora Core because it requires newer
versions of some packages.


As another example, with k3b, currently we're pretty much stuck. k3b,
which had been an add-on for a long time, was included in FC2 with version
0.11.9. The same version is available as an extra package for Red Hat
Linux and FC1. We cannot update the extra packages to a newer version,
because that would violate the upgrade path to FC2. But we don't have a
way to release unofficial updates or "Fedora Extras Test Updates" either.
Hence we have prepared k3b 0.11.10 for FC1 and RHL9, keeping it in
"pending", waiting for the FC2 version in "Updates Testing" to be released
some day. Meanwhile k3b 0.11.11 has been released, and the game continues.
As long as FC2 is stuck at k3b 0.11.9, we cannot upgrade the extra
packages.

So, in addition to the stable/testing/unstable, we could need a public
repository similar to "Updates Testing" in which to release stuff which
may or may not become an official update. We could also redefine the
purpose of the current "testing" repository for that.