[CentOS-devel] Why not a fusion between CentOS and SL?

[Les Mikesell]

On 3/24/2011 12:45 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
>
>> I think it was the opposite - that they had the lofty goal of having all
>> repositories coordinated even though that is clearly impossible unless
>> you can dictate a jailed iphone-like world.
>
> I used my own adjective 'Debianic' to indicate that Debian has for the most part already done this with no 'jail' required.  It can be done, and it can be done with a fully open structure, if all the players will just do it.  Of course, instead of third party repos you get whole different distributions, like Ubuntu, as a result, but that's preferrable to multiple overlapping and in many areas mutually exclusive repositories.

But it can't be done starting with Red Hat's policy, which was/is the 
real world starting point.

> Repository unification is the better goal; making the various repos work together when they aren't coordinated is much more difficult, and is the very definition of the word 'kludge.'  It didn't happen; and won't happen: but it would really have been nice had it happened.

An even better goal would be an LSB standard that actually lets 3rd 
party binaries work. Period, no qualifications except maybe minimum 
kernel and glibc versions.  Let me know when any distro cares.

> There are going to be situations where your mix isn't going to work at all, ever, because the packages you want need conflicting versions of various components; there is no technical solution for this other than not mixing and putting the two mutually exclusive 'things' on two different boxes, real or virtual.

Yes, and this tends to become a big problem as enterprise distributions 
age well beyond the 'best used by' date of a lot of components and more 
than one 3rd party wants to update a base library.  But it could be 
improved if you could keep those from jumping around as the different 
repos bump numbers at random times.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com