Hello All I may have ruffled some feathers with a comment i made earlier about rpmforge. This was posted back on the ML.

On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 14:47 -0600, lostson wrote:

For one stop using rpmforge this repo does nothing but trash a

system.

Discussion on that for us?

So to oblige here is a further discussion on this subject. The reason I say this about rpmforge is because if you install this repo and then do a yum update watch what it will install a huge amount of packages, which 9 times out of 10 is gonna get messy.(which can happen with any repo) And yes I know all about yum-pritorities another plugin that you can install to control the various repo's that one would like to add. I have no problems with this either.

Here is my issue the simple joy of playing a mp3 on rhythmbox or amarok should not be a test of one's admin skills or repo knowledge to get it to play. But it is, it is always "here read these 2 pages about yum-priorities plugin and repo's" I mean cmon really? There are 2 repo's CentOS Extras and CentOS Plus could this functionality be placed in here ? Where is the repo I read about months ago that was gonna be available for users to submit packages to ? These are all questions that should be getting asked.

Another point to make is on the list forums and other places we are seeing a influx of new users, coming from all sorts of other distro's and to make this simple instance so damn hard and having to pull from outside sources or repo's seems silly to me. Should CentOS not provide a simple and easy solution for some of these things ? I mean standard music and movie playback should be an easy one to get. There seems to be some areas where this is taking place for instance I know there is kmods for alot of things, but I am looking at the plain ol home user who wants to listen to music email basic desktop stuff. And yes I know all about the patent encumbered bs that everyone spouts all the time and i today's times this is just a moot point now.

Lets face it some of the other distro's are starting to show their true colors and are often too concerned with updates and the latest and greatest packages. Which is breaking more things than anything else. So people are coming to try out CentOS because of the stability and lets face it one of the best and helpful communities out there right now. And yes I know CentOS is mainly known for the RHEL compatibility and more server usage than anything else and that is the main goal, but why can the project not cater to the home user and tinkerer and developer as well ?

All in all I should not of called out rpmforge on such a short straw the work they do is excellent and any 3rd party repo you use has the potential to hose a machine no doubt about it.

All in all I'm not saying I want Cent to become one of the "other" distros here I'm just saying is there room for improvement ? To make things easier for the average user at home. We see it all the time on the lists and IRC and I'm thinking a more straightforward approach to the situation and keeping some things not all of course, but the simple ones inhouse and in Cent repo's instead of having to go outside the box just for simple things.

Oh well all in all this is just my humble opinion and I'm sure I will get ravaged and picked apart at the seams for this but hey that's me so fire away!!