Proposed F13 feature: drop separate updates repository

Josh Boyer jwboyer at gmail.com
Wed Dec 2 16:06:22 UTC 2009


On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 03:44:08PM +0000, Matthew Booth wrote:
> On 02/12/09 15:26, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 02:39:30PM +0000, Matthew Booth wrote:
>>> The separate updates directory has been a pain for as long as I've been
>>> using RHL/Fedora Core/Fedora. It means you have two places to look when
>>> searching for packages manually, and twice as much to configure when
>>> you're configuring yum. It has never benefitted me, or anybody I know,
>>> but it has caught me out on any number of occasions. What's more, nobody
>>> really seems to know why it's like that: it seems it's always been that
>>> way, and nobody ever bother to fix it.
>>>
>>> So lets fix it.
>>
>> And how do you propose to do that?
>
> Unfortunately I'm not intimately familiar with Fedora infrastructure  
> under-the-hood. However, I would hope that, technically at least, it  
> wouldn't be much more than a systematic removal of all updates  
> repositories and redirecting files which would have gone into them into  
> the main repositories instead. This stems from the observation that if  
> you copied everything from the main repository into updates you would  
> have created the repository which people unfamiliar with the history  
> would expect. The infrastructure side of this, on the face of it, sounds  
> very simple.

What you describe is effectively how the development repository is built,
so it's certainly a technical possibility.  It does have implications
though.  Off the top of my head, I can think of:

1) Composing a new everything tree for updates would lead to larger
compose times.  That could possibly mean that getting updates out would
take > 1 day per 'push'.  We've been trying to improve updates push
times so it would be a bit detrimental to that goal.

2) There might be GPL compliance issues

3) You would still need an 'updates-testing' repository given that this
is a supposedly stable release.  So there is still going to be at least
one additional repo regardless.

However, other than 'browsing manually for packages', I'm not really
sure what problem you are trying to solve by getting rid of the
updates repository.  It would seem like this has quite a bit of cost
for relatively little to no real gain?

josh




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