Fedora Extras is extra

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:42:45 -0500, William M. Quarles <quarlewm at jmu.edu> wrote:
> Several of the other repositories of which we speak are far from "mini."
>   They have been around longer and are still more popular than Fedora
> Extras.  Some have more packages.  Most have much better designed and
> more sophisticated websites.

There main issues... once you let yourself get beyond the heated
bloodlust between certain members in the discussion.... is the issue
of which world view you think is best long term.
And please, you have to take some of the more aggressive statements on
both sides in context. The discussion about this has gone on for years
now... well before Red Hat decided to name their project "Fedora." The
main parties in the debate reached a standoff several eons ago, some
of them just haven't realized there comes a point when you have to
stop and just agree to disagree, because sometimes perfectly rational
people will disagree for perfectly rationale reason. Though I will
say, I think too many people are behaving irrationally at this point
for continued discussion to be worthwhile. And to dwell on
"propaganda"... especially wiki comments that were reworded in an
effort to be more considerate..seems a delibrate ploy to keep the
issues heated well past the point where its constructive to do so.
People make mistakes, people get upset and mispeak, to dwell on this
does not move things forward.

I personally think it comes down to how you prioritize certain aspects
of the issue at hand relative to each other. In essense there are two
long term competing world views. Not 3 months from now... not 6 months
from now... think fc6 time schedule. Do you want to see as much
centralized system into one (or two) repository as possible. Or do you
want to see a several competing repositories each with overlap sets of
packages as the long term solution?  Each has its strengths and
weaknesses depending on what solution you are trying to solve.

I personally think moving to as much centralization provides a more
interesting Fedora Project. I like the idea Micheal Tiemann of Red Hat
has express about "Fedora Collections" where in the future once Core
and Extras exist in the same build environment you think about opening
up the space and having targetted media sets besides just Core, put
together from core and extras. I'm also concerned about relying on
system made of nearly individual packagers maintaining their own
individual repositories and build systems. I'm concerned about what
happens if one those individuals can no longer provide packages any
longer. Since there is no integrated build system between individual
repositories, it might be a significant amount of time for a volunteer
to duplicate the build system that repository was using if it goes
dark due to an individual maintainers.  If an individual maintainer
can no longer package in a centralized build system... a volunteer
does not need to try to duplicate any of the build infrastructure to
come forward and maintain the packages that were orphaned.

I have several other reasons why I personally prefer a long term
centralized solution, but i would have to say those are my two primary
reasons.  And i think its important that we all take a moment and
think about long term priorities and constraints, instead of getting
caught up in the day to day, back and forth debate. Without taking
anything away from those people who volunteered their efforts to
create large repositories of packages for the general public to use,
in the guideline vacuum Red Hat created for add-on packages through
the entire RHL period.. i think the long term health of Fedora is best
served with as much centralization of package build process as
possible moving forward.

-jef