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

[Les Mikesell]

R P Herrold wrote:

>>> ATM we'll just live and let live, and there will not be any one-side
>>> effort to rectify any compatibility issues EPEL created. It's their
>>> mess, they'll have to clean it up.
>>
>> Live and let die, you mean - at least as far as the users are 
>> concerned.  I don't think this issue has any solution other than 
>> separate namespaces.
> 
> Les
> 
> Your issue belongs on another list 

Sorry, but I believe that the people affected need to know about it at 
least as much as the people who control it.

 > -- the 'mark by nameing' the rpm's in
> a way obvious to a low sophistication user (rather than some checksum 
> based method that does not exist) has been proposed and rejected already.

That misses the point that there may very well be reasons to want to 
have more than one version installed at once.  Every developer should 
know that there are times you need to at least test 2 different versions 
  of something on the same machine - and they generally know how to do 
it so they don't conflict.  Sadly, the FHS guys seem to live on some 
planet of perfection where real world issues of version differences and 
places to store them don't exist, and packagers have followed along with 
this mistake.

> sad, but still the case.  We'll be having pain for this for years and 
> years. See:
>     https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-June/msg00031.html
> 
> Please read the archive and the back thread leading up to it. Several 
> @redhat.com showed up to pack the gallery at the 'last chance' epel 
> meeting which could have avoided this train wreck

Reasons for disagreements are pretty much irrelevant to their effect. 
There is not much reason to ever expect everyone to agree and lots of 
reasons to provide a mechanism to allow them to disagree in separate 
spaces.  Try to imagine what the internet would be like if DNS  did not 
provide managed hierarchal namespace and anyone could usurp anyone 
else's domain.  That's what we get when different people can put 
different contents into packages of the same names.  And it isn't going 
to go away until there is a namespace based system that lets the end 
user choose which he wants.  I'd just like to see a little less 
granularity in that namespace than centos vs. ubuntu...

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com