[CentOS] Re: Mixing RPMforge and EPEL (Was: EPEL repo)

[Les Mikesell]

Petr "Qaxi" Klíma wrote:
> Les Mikesell napsal(a):
>>>
>>> Correct, you would think Fedora took care of this, right ? But there 
>>> is no interest for Fedora to take care of that because they want to 
>>> be the only repository. It is not something they have an incentive 
>>> for to fix.
>>>
>>> That is exactly the problem. The repotag would be a workaround (and a 
>>> convenient one for users) but the real changes need to be in yum or 
>>> somewhere else. And Fedora does not care, so RHEL will not have it.
>>>
>>> I have warned for this on the Feodra mailinglist years ago. There 
>>> just is no interest to have the diversity of more than one repository.
>>
>> What value does diversity add when the end user can't select which one 
>> he wants or load all of them?  I understand the scenario where a 
>> single repository has a policy that prohibits certain packages from 
>> being included, but the only conflicts in those cases should be where 
>> an incomplete version is packaged in one place under the same name as 
>> the full version in a place with a different policy.  The more common 
>> case would just be additional packages or packages with different names.
>>
>> From an end-user viewpoint, I can't see why anyone would want to 
>> maintain a potentially-conflicting package of something that can be 
>> freely distributed and keep it in an isolated repository, especially 
>> without any mechanism to control which will be installed. Can you 
>> explain the reason anyone would want to have diversity instead of a 
>> single maintainer per package and the same packages in all 
>> repositories whose policies find them acceptable?
>>
> Diversity adds a lot of value. If EPEL will be only repo nobody on RHEL 
> workstation can see/listen MP3, WMA, DVD playing, because of interesting 
> US software patent and millenium act law.

That's not what I meant.  Obviously we need additional packages in other 
repositories and that will be true as long as there is any policy that 
might exclude any contribution to a centrally managed repository.  The 
question is, why do we need/want different versions of the same-named 
packages, or packages that provide different versions of the same files 
that can overwrite each other based on conditions we can't control? 
There probably is a good reason to want this - I just can't think of it 
right now.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com