package criteria

[Gene Czarcinski]

My question:  What types of packages should be in Fedora Extras?

I understand the intent is that some of the "less popular" packages now part 
of Fedora Core will be moved to Fedora Extras.  However, what other types of 
packages should be added to Fedora Extras?

Obviously, only packages which are fully GPL, LGPL, or at least BSD licensed 
should be included and I would also say: no binary-only software packages.

However, there are a number of other repositories such as freshrpms, ATrpms, 
and DAG which have a large number of packages.  Should some, a lot, all, 
or ??? of these packages be moved up from these (more or less single 
individual maintained) repositories to the multi maintained Fedora Extras?

A case in point that I came across is the partimage package.  I recently had 
the need to be able to "image" the harddisk on a laptop.  Furthermore, the 
"restore" had to be from a DVD.  After spending more time than I wished 
trying both a commercial package and something called "Mondo Rescue", I found 
that partimage worked and met my requirements.

Currently, partimage is available on the DAG repository.  Should partimage be 
included in Fedora Extras?  The partimage package appears to be included in 
some other distributions such as mandrake and debian and I, personally, 
believe it is a good package.  However, there has been little recent 
development activity and it may be orphaned.

In the absence of anyone better qualified willing to do it, I would be willing 
to take on package responsibility (DAG might be much better since he is 
already doing it for his own repository).  I have some experience 
writing/debugging C programs but only a little experience with C++ and 
partimage is written in C++.

Comments?

Is partimage a good candidate for Fedora Extras or should we avoid it?

Again, what types of packages are "good" candidates?

Gene