Fedora Extras is extra

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 11:44:26AM -1000, Chris Stark wrote:
> I think I have to agree with Mr. Quarles on this one. I don't like the 
> tone of their page. If Fedora Core is supposed to be a community 
> project, there should not be a centralized QA process for "acceptible" 
> packages. The community will decide what works by process of natural 
> selection.

Natural selection doesn't work that way. I'll go for a more, um, punctuated
equilibrium approach. Throwing all the repositories together into chaos and
hoping it all works just isn't going to be any good.

> probably the appropraite thing to do). But undermining other repos by 
> using conflicting naming systems IS "Microsoft-ish" (and thus utterly 
> reprehensible) and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Where does it say that FE is planning on using a "conflicting naming
system"? (Not on the linked-to fedora.us page....)

> If fedora.us wants to start including packages that are already 
> available from FreshRPMs, Dag, etc., they should work with these other 
> repositories' maintainers and contributors. Linux is about 
> collaboration. By trying to assert dominance and control over the 
> community development process, they're only going to alienate users and 
> developers.

There *isn't* a community development process yet. But it's still promised
as "really just around the corner real soon now", and I'm willing to wait a
little bit longer. There _has_ to be some centralized quality control, just
to make sure everything can coexist properly. Mini-repositories operating in
a vacuum are, as the page says, inevitably going to have clashes.

(This is why DAG, FreshRPMS, et al. are also working on coordinating more
closely, which is _also_ a very good thing.)

> I've removed them from my repo list just out of principle.

Heh. Have fun with that.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>