Rex Dieter wrote:
Axel Thimm wrote:
On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 04:38:04PM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
But also very disappointed from the course that EPEL chose to take wrt to all other 3rd party repos. He's currently stripping off repotags from his repo cursing all day people in EPEL that forced him to do this.
Maybe if we all can agree to some ground rules, then all repos can play nice. See proposal: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/RepositoryCollaboration
These rules should had been going w/o saying
I agree, but this seems necessary for some(*). Without acknowledgment of equal-footing for all parties, progress will be a very uphill battle.
-- Rex
(*) Since I continue to hear gripes about which repos were first or (should) have priority or clout.
Without straining my brain too much, I find it hard to imagine how you can positively mandate what order the repos should be considered for someone whose needs you don't know. Mine, say.
What I think is needed is a clear, obvious way to say I want rpmforge for madwifi, atrpms for, um, postgresql, Fedora for KDE (I'm being ridiculous, you say? Let me!), and standard Centos5 repos for everything else. Oh, just a mo, I'll have Oracle for Java (assuming it's there).
I don't care whether rpmforge has newer postgresql, it's atrpm's I want, and I want rpmforge madwifi but never postgresql.
Any repo might have newer something that I want, but I don't want the newest, I want the one from the source I nominate.
And so it's perfectly clear to anyone how to do this, the Right Way needs to stick out like Gillie's ears (with apologies to Adam Gilchrist fans).
If this means a modification to yum is required, then a modification to yum is required.
The fact you decide (assuming you do) that rpmforge is the premier third-party repo does not of itself mean that all your users will agree with you.
I got into a bit of a mess with Debian, back when Woody was "stable" and had been for two or more years. There were newer Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, all sorts of stuff built for Woody, and I found myself using a long list of repos, and getting stuff from places I didn't intend.
Debian does have a means if pinning software to particular repos, but one has to read the documentation fairly closely to discover it. Or complain loudly that no such facility exists.
More recently has been the advent of backports.org which has lots of little repos. One for postgresql. One for mysql. One (I expect) for php. (Actually, there may be several sometimes, but if php 5.0 in testing got replaced by php 5.2, then php 5.0 would vanish from backports too). Probably there was one for xen 3.0, I'm not sure I looked.
Once one finds backports.org, it is suitably simple to control what comes from where: in fact, it's hard not to.
Package naming is still important, so as to ensure an easy upgrade from unofficial extras to subsequent official packages. Debian has a policy to guide that too.