Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Rahul Sundaram]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, but now we are back to the fact that the jpackage ones didn't 
>>> conflict with anything until fedora started including conflicting 
>>> ones, so it seems in bad taste to blame the third party. 
>>
>> I didn't blame anyone. Just stated facts.
> 
> Same here.  No conflicts existed until fedora packagers duplicated 
> packages that already existed in well-known repositories and forked them 
> instead of mirroring.

A cross distribution package repository is always going to be different 
from a distribution specific repository.

> Which still doesn't explain why any needed package that existed 
> elsewhere couldn't be maintained identically to eliminate the conflict 
> issue.  Maybe there's a case of that somewhere but I'm not convinced it 
> would have been a problem in general.  Would jpackage really have 
> refused to have the same maintainer make sure common packages were 
> always identical?

It is impossible to do that. Fedora has its own release cycle, licensing 
policies and packaging guidelines. The package dependencies will differ 
in many cases based on all of these.

> Factor 1 is that the fedora repo doesn't include everything that the 
> pre-existing repositories provided and users still need.  Whenever this 
> comes up you respond about legalities/policy etc., etc., but the reasons 
> don't matter.   The fact is they aren't there.  This shouldn't be an 
> issue, since the other repos are still around, but...

Software packages are in the Fedora repository because people 
volunteered to do so. That has nothing to do with legalities or policies 
and yes those might be a reason too and goes to the core of why such 
third party repositories even exist regardless of whether you care about 
them or not.

> Factor 2 is that _some_ of the packages from the 3rd party repos were 
> forked into potentially conflicting versions that may cause problems 
> with the original, while factor 1 ensures that you can't get all of the 
> packages you are likely to need without them.  And a side effect seems 
> to be that the old repos are no longer particularly interested in 
> supporting fedora.

That's not the real reason again as explained to you earlier.

> If you can't address the effects of both factors at once, I guess there 
> really isn't anything else to say.

If you keep ignoring what is being said to you, there is no point 
indeed. Move on.

Rahul