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

[Michael K. Johnson]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 01:44:48AM -0400, Bruce A. Locke wrote:
> 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.

Those kinds of problems are generally from poor segregation rather
than pure externalism.  Having *core* components in external
respositories doesn't make much sense; that's what creates the kinds
of problems you have seen, IMHO.  But there are lots of kinds of
functionality where there really isn't any particular need to tie
them into a distro release.

I will clearly say that there is not a Red Hat policy to try to move
most of the distro out into external repositories; that's been mentioned
in several threads on these lists before.  We have explicitly stated
that our expectation starting this process was that the distro is more
likely to grow than to shrink by this process.

However, it absolutely is important to Red Hat to enable external
repositories -- and we want to make it easier to do right, as well.

> 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.

Thanks, I'm glad it's been clear that this is the case.  It feels
good to us, too.  :-)

michaelkjohnson

 "He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
 Linux Application Development                     -- Ben Franklin
 http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/