rpmforge and {enterprise, } Extras (Was Re: Initial Proposal for doing Enterprise Extras=

[Dag Wieers]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:

> >>>>> "JW" == Jarod Wilson <jwilson at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> JW> That is a perfectly valid example. I know of folks running
> JW> mission- critical RHEL3 (or older) servers that they'd like to add
> JW> something modern, like an up-to-date subversion server to...
> 
> It's not as if it's difficult to build fresh packages for whatever
> distro you have, as long as prerequisites don't require you to rebuild
> half of the distro.
> 
> And for everyone who would like an updated subversion, there's someone
> else who would like an updated apache, or an updated openssh.  And I'd
> bet that those who want one package to be updated would really not
> want everything else to be updated as well.  After all, they're still
> using RHEL Vancient for a reason.

Exactly my point ! That's why the dependency resolver should be able to 
following the end-user's policy.

 - Do not upgrade base packages (ie. packages from this or that repository)
 - Do not upgrade this package to a newer version (or to a newer version+release)
 - Do not upgrade to a package from another repository than the one installed
 - ...

These are all valid policies, and these policies can be different per 
package. Something like this is important, because you may want to 
serve a stable subversion repository. But on another server you require 
the latest subversion client, or maybe not the latest but specifically 
version 1.2.1.

That's why creating more than one repository is not going to be of any 
help. We need a better Yum, better pinning in Apt. Smart is almost ok as 
it is :)

I've made this case many times. The taolinux developer made a baseprotect 
patch almost 2 years ago. Seth didn't see a need and there were probably 
more pressing needs anyway. Now the CentOS people are improving a similar 
plugin for Yum. Discussions can be seen on the CentOS mailinglists.

'One repository rules them all' is something that was nice to promote when 
Fedora Extras was taking off. But it's a far cry from reality and 
diversity/development has been hurt by it.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]