Fedora needs more evangelism for repositories

[Brad Smith]

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, though I think they would be
better made as individual emails to the people that run these sites. I
don't know of any prominent Fedora sites that advocate unnescessary
forced installs, but agree that if such exist they should probably be
changed. That said, I don't run any of those sites and so can't do
anything about it. And there's no guarantee that the people who do run
those sites read this list.

As for writing a document on why users should use repositories vs
downloading packages I have two comments:

1) I think there are times when downloading and installing a package
is fine, even preferable to using a repository. One example is when
there are no dependancies issues and there is no expectation that the
user will be installing other packages from that repo often. Adding
repositories unnescessarily to your apt/yum config files just
increases the the number of headers to be dealt with, taking up time
and disk space. I think a document on the subject should keep this in
mind.

2) I run fedoratracker.org, the goal of which is to make searching and
using fedora apt/yum repositories more practical. If you want to draft
a document like the one you describe and it turns out well then if no
one from a more authoritative site offers to I can link it from my
'resources' page.

--Brad



On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 18:19:16 -0700, Mike Fedyk <mfedyk at matchmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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