Fedora Extras is extra
Dag Wieers
dag at wieers.com
Mon Nov 29 08:05:59 UTC 2004
On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 01:14 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
>
> > refuse to try and build packages that are cross compatible
> "Refuse" is he wrong wording. It's technically impossible to be
> compatible with arbitrary repositories containing competing packages, so
> at least I don't even try to spend/waste time on trying to be
> compatible.
Ralf, it's not impossible. There was a time, when fedora.us did not exist,
when there were a few repositories that did not know about each other and
did their own thing. At some point it was clear that there was too much
overlap and it made sense to at least make some policies and standars and
when things break to work together to fix it.
The result is here today, all major repositories (kde-redhat, freshrpms,
planetccrma, atrpms, dries, dag, ...) they are all compatible with a
minimum of effort. Sure from time to time there's something that
conflicted either due to an oversight or miscommunication, in each case it
was fixed within a few hours and (at least if you used apt) would seldom
lead to a system that was impossible to update.
All that is necessary is that when something new is released, you first
look if it already exists. If it already exists talk the the 'authority'
of that package and see what you would do different and what would cause
incompatibilities.
But instead fedora.us releases stuff that already existed for almost 2
years in my repository and change package-names so that it breaks. Or
releases packages that does not follow a naming-convention that was even
discussed on the fedora.us mailinglist at the very beginning.
I hate to bring this up again, but these are examples where a minimum of
effort would have helped a lot of Fedora users. And by refusing to even
discuss this (see the RepositoryMixing document) there are now 2 camps,
not 3, not 4, only 2. fedora.us and non-fedora.us. Some repositories
manage to be compatible with both, some don't even bother anymore because
of this policy.
For me there's no reason to be incompatible. In fact, by being
incompatible my users are indirectly harmed as they are inable t use
fedora.us or livna.org. (Mind you, if you stay away from these
incompatible packages, you won't notice this).
> > in spite of
> > Dag's attempts to work with them and make packages that "just work"
> > regardless of what site they came from and what site mixture is used.
>
> Such attempts can only work in special cases at one point in time.
> In general and in longer terms, they are doomed to fail.
How do you know ? If 2 years isn't a long term, then what is ?
If you don't try, you will never know, right ?
But please explain to me why it is doomed to fail ?
-- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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