That ole Livna Problem/That ole VLC Problem

[Michael Schwendt]

On 17/01/2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael Schwendt wrote:
>
> >>> The burden
> >>> of avoiding repository compatibility problems is on the 3rd party
> >>> packagers' shoulders.
> >> I'd call this a recipe for disaster,
> >
> > You misunderstood. It's not a recipe, it's the situation we're still in.
>
> You say 'still' as though you think the situation could change.

This thread won't change it. ;)

Some of the things written here are only the tip of the ice-berg.
Proposed solutions are missing. _Still_ (!) missing. Probably it's
only a matter of time till somebody comes here to attack me for
litterally stirring the pot.

Ask yourself, how would you fix the problems instead of only pointing
the finger at the Fedora Project and its Forbidden-Things-Policy? How
would you eliminate overlapping contents in multiple repositories
without merging the projects or without copying packages unmodified?
What binding policies would inter-repo collaboration need? And would
the volunteers like them? It's not the non-free add-ons that cause
problems, more often it's redundant/overlapping/conflicting packages.
What started as just another 3rd party repo for add-on packages became
a community project, later became part of the Fedora Project, then
merged with Fedora Core and hence increased the "core" package base.
It would be natural to not replace any packages in that base
distribution. But how are you going to convince long-time productive
3rd party packagers that they should stop packaging anything that is
found in the base dist nowadays?