Fedora needs more evangelism for repositories

[Mike Fedyk]

Hi,

I've been using Debian since Dec 1998, and only Debian until now that 
I'm giving Fedora a shot for various reasons.  Mostly because a Linux 
newbie friend of mine has chosen Fedora as his distribution, and hearing 
the trials and tribulations he's going through can't be as bad as he 
says...  So here I am. ;)

Being used to Debian, package repositories just makes sense to me, and 
I've refused to try anything else that doesn't support repositories. 
Luckily thanks to Conectivia, rpm based distributions are catching up to 
Debian as far as repositories go.

With repositories all the sites have to say is "install this apt rpm, 
and then type apt-get install package-name", (with the sources.list 
already populated by the rpm package -- or what is needed to add to your 
sources.list file as I've seen some sited do).  I don't want to even get 
into apt vs yum -- that's for another thread altogether.

Instead we still have prominent fedora help web sites listing individual 
packages from repositories like dag and freshrpms that even *tell the 
user to force the packages*!

Forcing package installations is only for expert users (like the people 
who know how to *create* an rpm), not for your average Linux user -- and 
especially not for new users!

OK, so now that you've read this far... What can we do about it?

I have some ideas that may be good or bad.  Let's see what you guys 
think of them:

  o create an article called "why you should be using repositories vs 
individual package download and installation"

  o work with web site authors asking them to either take down, or 
convert their sites from lists of individual package files to 
instructions on using the repositories instead

  o create docs (and merge the info from the sites mentioned above) on 
an official fedora site (like maybe fedorafaq.org?) to merge the docs 
and helpful hints into one place so it's not spread out so much

That might be enough for this message.  I'm looking forward to the 
thread that arises from this message. :)

Mike