[CentOS-devel] Why not a fusion between CentOS and SL?

On Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:40:37 am Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 3/24/2011 8:42 AM, Dag Wieers wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
> >> the new yum ( in fedora ) knows that, basically it prefers to install
> >> from the same repo from where you already have stuff.

> > Great ! This helps with cross-repository use in Yum.

> I never quite understood why that wasn't designed in from the start. 

Because the yellowdog updater-modified developers didn't have that lofty of a goal in mind from the start?  

Hindsight is 20/20; perhaps people thought at the time that cooperation in a Debianic way could happen between the various 3rd party repos and make repo mixing problems a thing of the past?  We know now that that didn't happen, almost entirely due to personality/political things.  Not casting any blame at all; but the people who saw the 'unified Debianic repository' dream die, in real-time (you were around then, Les, being just as much of a gadfly then as now) know what happened.  That's about the time I dropped all my fedora list subscriptions; I've just since F13 resubscribed to the fedora-users list.

And there was a bigger issue to address, that of dependency solving.  I'm glad the yellowdog updater-modified developers chose to solve that problem first, and not worry about overdesigning for a problem that had not yet reared its ugly head (at the time).  Oh, and let's not forget the absolutely wonderful presto and delta rpm work.

Or we could all still be on apt-rpm and still be having multilib and related issues.  And while synaptic is still far and away the best package management GUI out there bar none, the apt-rpm backend has (or at least had) significant issues at that time.