Proposal: Rolling Release

[Horst H. von Brand]

Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael Schwendt wrote:

> > How does that answer my question? Let me repeat. I've asked what
> > policy it is that "forced a horribly fractured 3rd party repository
> > situation"? I'm not aware of any such policy.

> All I can say is that with Ubuntu you can pick vendor drivers and Sun
> Java 1.5 from the software management tool and you almost never have
> to worry about conflicts among packages from the different
> repositories. I've repeatedly requested these things in fedora and
> been repeatedly told it wasn't going to happen.

What the people handling non-Fedora repositories do (or fail to do) is not
Fedora's fault. Go talk to them. Help clarify the "interface" they have to
keep to be able to interoperate cleanly with Fedora. Etc.

Complaining here won't do any good. Fedora's policies are (in large part)
dictated by US (and other) laws. If other distributions believe that they
are inmune to that because of geographical or other reasons, it's their
risk-taking (And I for one like the "no risk" policy of Fedora better than
fearing that some fine day my distribution becomes non viable because it is
being accused of large-scale "software piracy". Remember Linux is what it
is (at least in part) because of the fear around the USL-BSDI-UCB lawsuits).

> > There simply is not enough man-power
> > to spend additional time on coordinating between 3rd party packagers.

If somebody is willing to do the work, I'm certainly not going to stand in
the way. It is much more (and harder) work than what it superficially looks
like, that is all.

> That's something that potential users have to take into account when
> choosing the distro they are going run.

Right.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
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