Name is but sound and smoke

Doug Stewart dstewart at atl.lmco.com
Wed Nov 12 19:28:02 UTC 2003


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
| On Nov 11, 2003, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
|
|
|>>The idea (as I understand it) is that people want to easily have
|>>add-on packages in their system without a risk that this might modify
|>>core components.
|
|
|>E.g. choose their stability level. So let's use stability criterions.
|
|
| It's not really the same.
|
| One of the points is at the time of reporting a bug.  Say I find a bug
| in Mozilla, or in mplayer.  Unless I can pinpoint which repository I
| got Mozilla from, or the exact dependency of mplayer that caused the
| bug, to figure out where I should report it, I'll be at a loss.
|
| Being able to make sure that a certain package (along with all of its
| dependencies) is part of the Core makes it simpler to assert whether a
| bug is in the Core or not, as long as you stick to only Extras
| repositories.  As soon as you introduce Alternatives, any hopes of
| easily identifying the source of a problem are gone, and this doesn't
| even get into inter-repository compatibility problems.
|

Lovely.  And no one ever got fired for buying IBM.

What happens if I think the Core package stinks like week-old Chinese
food?  What if I want a DVD player that can *gasp* play my DVDs?  What
if I want my mother to be able to play the MP3s she has on her machine?

There are tradeoffs for official vs. unofficial repositories, obviously,
but I seem to see far too many RH employees posting "It's our way or the
highway" types of messages to this (and the Test) list.  If it's really
supposed to be a "community"-run "project", then maybe accomodations
should be made for the community.

Why not draw up an official packaging spec?  Say "As long as packagers
stick to this nomenclature, they should be able to interoperate with
FC".  Mandate a repo tag in the filename, or, heck, in the "packager"
field of the .spec.  Then, when users have an issue with a package, tell
them "What repo is it from?  Run rpm --whatrepo [packagename] and then
bother the repo maintainer for support."

Thoughts?
- --
- ----------
Doug Stewart
Systems Administrator/Web Applications Developer
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs
dstewart at atl.lmco.com

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE/sonCN50Q8DVvcvkRAnRUAJ43hfaTeAmOHOCTlRWd8f9khpfnbACaA/fN
zms6etUquT3X8nBPtUKeL4s=
=Chhy
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----





More information about the fedora-list mailing list