Fedora Project launches Pre-Extras

Michael Schwendt fedora at wir-sind-cool.org
Sun Dec 19 14:27:40 UTC 2004


On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 14:59:45 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers wrote:

> > > No no, most of the users do want a disttag and repotag. This mailinglist 
> > > does not reflect that because very few people here are actual users.
> > 
> > What an irony. I bet those users are mislead by the repotag inflation and
> > don't consider looking for alternatives. Tell users how to query vendor,
> > distribution and signature fields, after those are used properly by
> > all parties involved.
> 
> No no, read the list of advantages. None of the proposed work-arounds 
> offer the same set of advantages.
> 
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-December/msg00498.html

That list is adjusted to your specific point of view and your personal
wishes and goals. Items in that list disregard any of the discussed
pitfalls.

On the contrary, the people you discuss with acknowledge the benefits
of disttags, but concentrate on avoiding pitfalls or improper use.

> > > Yes, my first paragraph was wrong, for some reason I thought fedora.us 
> > > finally decided to have disttags.
> > 
> > Funnily, they have had disttags since day one, because it is implemented
> > in the buildsystem: rh80 -> rh90 -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 in right-most part of
> > release. I'm not going into a loop with regard to discussing them.
> 
> Ok. But 1 and 2 is very Fedora centric and has no purpose in the larger 
> scale of things that exist. How would one know whether 3 means FC3 or EL3?

The question is wrong. It should be:

  How do I find out whether a package is for FC3 or EL3?

The "Distribution" field would contain "Fedora Core 3" for all FC3
packages and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3" for all RHEL3 packages.
You use that field already, too. 

You put "Dag Apt Repository for Fedora Core 3" in there, and I hope
you didn't forget about that.

A '3' in the filename is ambiguous. An 'fc3' substring in a filename
is ambiguous, too. Adding ambiguous and non trustworthy vendor
information in the filename doesn't make it better. '.rf' is as poorly
chosen as '.fdr' or '.fr'. You expect that users know that .fr does
not mean "french" and that .rf doesn't mean "redhat fedora".

Similarly, there are much better ways how to query a package for who
made it. Vendor and Packager information and signature are
available. Let's put them to good effect, please.




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