Conflicts with 3rd party repos (was: Re: sound problems)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 11:00:45 +0200, Axel wrote:

> We had a discussion with Max and Mike at LinuxTag about this last year
> and the common approach was that Fedora packagers would be kindly
> asked to check and cooperate with (major) 3rd party repos instead of
> blindly packaging creating the incompatibilities (actually this was
> more in the loght of EPEL than Fedora proper). Unfortunately this was
> never really followed up after the meeting.

Interesting. Why do Max [Spevack] and Mike [McGrath?] assume this is
feasible? This is different from the results of previous discussions
within old FESCO, FESCo and another major 3rd party repo. The participants
of previous discussions [to my knowledge] have all found that it is not
feasible (or requires too much effort). What has changed? Do the members
of the current committees have a different opinion?

One could establish a list of "big players" in the 3rd party repo scene,
specific repo URLs, and corresponding guidelines, and make it a MUST item
on the list of things to do during package review. That would increase the
hurdle quite a bit for the packagers and reviewers. And there are no tools
available that check for conflicts with arbitrary repositories. Some
existing [unofficial] scripts either need local access to all packages or
run for quite a long time. There have been conflicting duplicates in the
review queue as well as within the Fedora package collection.