Goodbye, Fedora

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:03:50 -0500 (EST), Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my
> limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me
> into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which
> an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system 
> unusable.

Without details it is hardly possible to comment on it. But pointing out
the following should be allowed:

The Fedora Extras 6 repository currently is free of broken dependencies.

The Fedora Extras 5 repository contains a single broken package that
is broken for 131 days (linphone).

Conflicts in Fedora Extras are due to the committee's refusal to publish
related policies. Instead, packagers and reviewers are confronted with
lots of minor policies and bureaucracy.

> The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository
> maintenance,

"Incompetent" in what way? At least on the Fedora Extras side we haven't
had any broken metadata, unsigned rpms or permission problems for a very
very long time. That part of the repository maintenance has been flawless.

In the "development" repositories, broken dependencies could only be
prevented in Core, because Core and Extras are still separate and use
separate build systems, too. When and if they are merged for Fedora 7, it
would be possible to only publish packages (or sets of packages), which
don't break any install-time dependencies. Still, it would not guarantee
that the development side of Fedora is usable and free of problems always.