RH Decisions (was Re: APT, Yum and Red Carpet)

Bruce A. Locke blocke at shivan.org
Thu Aug 14 05:44:48 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 00:55, Rik van Riel wrote:

> Indeed, since the project went live around the same time as the
> Severn beta (beta == code freeze) this time the core release
> probably won't have all that much community input.  Personally I
> hope this will result in a culture of using external repositories
> so the core distribution for the next version could be shrunk ;))

Am I the only one who reels in horror at this thought?  I can't see any
outcome from doing this other then encouraging even more slightly
incompatible competing external repositories.  None of them having
everything you want or need, causing you to either have to 'graft' in
parts of one into another or grab the most you can from one and having
to play with spec files and building your own packages for the other.

Have you gone through the horror of getting XD2, fedora, freshrpms, and
a couple others working on the same system without weird application
behaviors, crashes, and apt/yum freaking out?  

Sorry if this was beaten to death already in past threads but my
interested in "RHL: The Project" centers around the hope these external
repositories are (for the most part) _eliminated_ and we have one
central repository where library versions and other dependencies, etc
all match.  

We need a sane dependency tree for the vast amount of software out there
for Red Hat that doesn't require "--forcing" and "--nodeps" or end-users
spending time with "rpmbuild".  (Small repositories will of course still
exist for those _really_ niche packages).    Encouraging the development
of even more external repositories sounds like a sure way of increasing
the pain of "RPM dependency hell".

As a former Gentoo developer (I'm not trying to make that sound like it
means something in this forum, I'm only to provide an example from
personal experience), I found Gentoo initially attractive because it
allowed for a configurable feature set and flexible dependency tree
system but it was _one repository_... one tree.

I moved back to Red Hat from Gentoo due to a lack of time and not
wanting to worry about such things.  As a Red Hat user I gave up some
flexibility with the hope of saving time and using a stable and
integrated system ("It just works") or at least one that was predictable
broken ("Well... it doesn't work but I can count on being broken the
same on every version X system and this workaround will work on most/all
of them...").   Having to depend on external repositories that can (and
have proven to be historically) not "integrated" between themselves and
incompatible with constantly changing versions for key libraries and
applications destroys that advantage.

Basically, in my view, it creates anarchy where I don't want to be
exposed to such anarchy.  Distributions were originally supposed to be
tested snapshots of software from the open source world and not just a
means to sell a support contract right?... right?!  <Joke> The
conspiracy theorist in me could argue Red Hat was expecting this anarchy
and wants it because it would help push their Enterprise product to
people who couldn't afford to deploy it on every machine... :P </Joke> 

On the plus side though, I have been very impressed by willingness of
Red Hat employees to discuss things that would have been 'confidential
information' only a short time ago.  Thanks.


-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce A. Locke
blocke at shivan.org






More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list