Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Les Mikesell]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
>  Why, for example, couldn't the changes you say
>> fedora needs as a dependency for openoffice be included in the 
>> jpackage repository for that fedora release and maintained as exact 
>> copies?
> 
> You are again ignoring reasons already explained. Jpackage specializes 
> in Java packages and doesn't include all the packages Fedora does and 
> vice versa. So the dependencies cannot be the same. Even it does there 
> are differences in release cycles, patches, packaging and licensing 
> policy among other reasons. It is pretty difficult to have two variants 
> of a software with different maintainers in two different repositories 
> perfectly in sync all the time even with the best efforts.

The 'different maintainers' is the point in question.  Did anyone offer 
to maintain the duplicated packages upstream with needed changes instead 
of forking incompatible ones?  Packages fedora doesn't include and vice 
versa are irrelevant as long as the dependencies within each set can be 
met internally.  It's not a matter of whether this is difficult or not, 
it is a question of whether some well informed person involved with the 
distribution/repositories does it once or whether every user who needs 
something not included in the base repository has to muddle through the 
incompatibilities himself and hope it doesn't change by the next update.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com