Some questions about Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> Hi Seth,
> 
> Thanks a lot for your answers.
> 
> On 20/09/07 at 08:42 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
>> On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 09:11 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>>> Q1. Packages
>>> How many "pieces of software" do you have in your distribution?
>> In our development distribution:
>> - 8232 compiled packages (binaries)
>> - 4638 source packages 
> 
> Mmmh, If I'm a fedora user, and need a package for something that isn't
> in those 8232 binary packages, what should I do? Install from sources?
> Or is there some sort of organized way to look for RPMs in unofficial
> repositories? (I head of rpmfind, but I'm not sure it's what I think)

http://fedoratracker.org/ served this purpose previously but I don't 
think it's functional anymore.  Mixing third party repositories with 
conflicting packages or ones that replace base packages can lead to 
dependency issues.

Ideally, someone would step up and maintain those packages in the 
official repositories but Fedora does not distribute non-free software 
or Free software with potential patent issues.

A few of the third party repositories that do distribute such software 
are recently attempting to merge in http://rpmfusion.org. Hopefully 
between the official repository and this we will have all the packages 
that end users usually need.

If you want to search for individual packages, http://rpmfind.net and 
http://rpm.pbone.net/ but you can run into dependency issues for complex 
packages.

Rahul