On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 10:08:38AM -0800, Ray Van Dolson wrote:
On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 12:03:51PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Morten Torstensen wrote:
[snip away bible quotes]
This is getting way off topic, please consider what you post.
Having only one true repository whose name shall not be uttered in the package filenames doesn't remind you of anything?
No. What exactly are you getting at? :)
Seems like this issue is kinda moot at this point... and honestly, although maybe it would have been _nice_ for EPEL to use repotags, I think their thinking is that Fedora and Fedora Extras in the past doesn't use them; they consider themselves "upstream" in a way and are sticking to that same behavior. They also didn't feel that repotags were really a good solution to the problem.
Many discussions and arguments occurred, but in the end this is how it worked out. And if I recall, EPEL did finally agree to use repotags, but ATrpms had already removed all repotags from their packages so the driving reason to do it was at that point gone.
Oh, no, don't put the blame on ATrpms ;)
The repotag issue was just a frontend where the non-cooperation of EPEL with the rest of the world was demonstrated to beyond anyone's imagination. Only after several people that EPEL was trying to attract turned their backs and upon that some RH officials raised their heads to the EPEL "chairmen" where there some reevaluation about repotags.
So repotags was a small issue which failed on EPEL's non-cooperation. I don't see why more important issues would ever have a better faith, and I lost a lot of momentum in this fake discussion. The bottom point is that EPEL just wanted to enter the repo world of RHEL/CentOS and friends w/o caring about what existed there, and placing any compatibilty burden on others' shoulders.
It's unfortunate, but doesn't seem like it's going to change. I guess that doesn't mean we need to stop talking about it, but maybe instead of hollering about the need for repotags it's time to collaborate in the other direction -- building a better way to track reopsitories into the RPM database itself.
No *technical* solution will ever solve this. Even the best package manager in the world cooking coffee in its idle time will not solve packagers not talking to each other and creating conflicting and incompatible packages. And we've tried talking and coordinating, it's the EPEL side of the world that decides to play the Highlander theme again ("there can only be one").
So to answer the subject: No, EPEL is incompatible to every other repo that existed before EPEL came up. That was not the original promise of EPEL (I know as I was a steering member before I gave up on this insanity course), but it developed that way. </rant>