[CentOS] mplayer repository for CentOS

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 21 May 2005, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 07:46 +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
>
> > With Fedora Extras it didn't much improve in the sense that the only
> > way they listen is if you're part of the team and the only way to be
> > part of the team is to sign legal papers.
> 
> From my understanding, as of January, they have a formal package
> submission processor whereby you do not.  I've been talking to a few
> people about adding my own.

How's that going to work ? If a package has no maintainer, it is orphaned. 
You need to sign the legal papers to be able to maintain a package (ie. 
get CVS access). Anyway, that wouldn't be a solution as they don't care 
about RHEL, so you'll have to fork anyway and manage the forks.


> Unless, of course, you want to have your own, "independent" repository,
> and use the formal name.  Yes, that's a legal thing then, and
> unavoidable.

Why would someone want to do that ? What are you implying ?


> > So they introduced (and are introducing) stuff that breaks my stuff and 
> > they don't care.
> 
> Someone "has to be the master."  It's just reality.  It is the same deal
> in the Debian world.

Well, if we have to have a master, then give me a kind one :-)


> > And it wouldn't even help as they're not doing RHEL packages and fork for 
> > different distributions. They actually only support the latest Fedora 
> > release and the previous Fedora release. So tough luck if you want RHEL2, 
> > RHEL3
> 
> I think that is now changing that it is now more formalized.  Prior to
> January, it was largely just the former U of Hawaii.  But now I'm seeing
> FE and, even more so, Lorg supporting all the way back to at least FC1.
> That means I'm good for RHEL3 so far -- although I admit no one can
> predict the future.

Livna.org is working differently and better to that respect.


> Not to step on your continued good will and endeavors, but how much
> regression testing do you do of your packages before you put them out?
> If it compiles, great, if it builds, ship it?  That's what I assume it
> is?

Correct, test it yourself is what you have to do now. Want to help out and 
start doing regression tests ? It's the same for Fedora Extras on RHEL 
by the way. Tough luck running Fedora binaries on RHEL.

RPMforge is only with 4 (+ all the people that give feedback), we invite 
people to help us out. If you think something is important enough, don't 
waste your time, do something about it :)

BTW the testing that I've seen with FE is often also not more than QA of 
the SPEC file (most of our stuff is much more consistent in that area). Of 
course there is a big difference between the important packages and 
the seldomly used ones.


> > (and when Fedora 5 is released RHEL4 packages from Fedora Extras
> > probably don't build because of changes).
> 
> Possibly.  I've been very, very critical of Red Hat's current
> "revisioning strategy" (or lackthereof) with Fedora Core and I believe
> it's ultimately going to affect their RHEL release quality.  There's
> absolutely no reason for this, but I think some people have forgotten
> the stilts that RHEL is built on -- just like RHL before it.
> 
> Which is why I'm seriously considering moving to SuSE Linux, because
> Novell seems to have a formal Novell-SuSE strategy that ties well
> together.  We'll see as of NL10, SL10.x, but I'm hopeful.

And you can^Whave to use Yast ! :)


> > So you're basicly mixing a philosophy (Fedora Core development, not 
> > looking back) and the philosophy that says, keep compatibility with older 
> > distributions, and only fork when maintaining a single SPEC file is more 
> > costly than forking.
> 
> Make no mistake, I'm _no_fan_ of Red Hat's "undeclared" strategy on
> Fedora Core, and the greater Fedora Project in general.  They are
> starting to take more of a "pro-active" interest in the greater Fedora
> Project as of January, and that's good.

Still they don't have to care about stuff older than 1 year, and that has 
an affect on newer RHEL releases too, regarding compatibility.


> > BTW Much of the rest of your email was pretty incorrect about the history 
> > of Fedora and existing repositories.
> 
> Can you be specific?  Please correct my misinformation then, for all our
> benefit (including my own).  A lot of my information comes from being on
> the Red Hat lists, talking to Red Hat employees as well as the Red Hat
> marketing to try to repair a lot of the damage that eWeek's mis-quotes
> of Michael Tiemann did back in 2003.

Look at the mails from 2002 and 2003 on the fedora.us mailinglist, read 
about the epoch zero and other such decisions and ask yourself why 
fedora.us failed to attract the existing packagers.

With the backing of Red Hat of course things changed dramatically. Anyway, 
I do not have the time to reiterate these things, not as much time as you 
seem to have.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]