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

On Thursday, March 24, 2011 12:50:47 pm Les Mikesell wrote:
> I think it was the opposite - that they had the lofty goal of having all 
> repositories coordinated even though that is clearly impossible unless 
> you can dictate a jailed iphone-like world.

I used my own adjective 'Debianic' to indicate that Debian has for the most part already done this with no 'jail' required.  It can be done, and it can be done with a fully open structure, if all the players will just do it.  Of course, instead of third party repos you get whole different distributions, like Ubuntu, as a result, but that's preferrable to multiple overlapping and in many areas mutually exclusive repositories.  The situation right now is not as bad as I have seen it, and that is good.

Repository unification is the better goal; making the various repos work together when they aren't coordinated is much more difficult, and is the very definition of the word 'kludge.'  It didn't happen; and won't happen: but it would really have been nice had it happened.

There are going to be situations where your mix isn't going to work at all, ever, because the packages you want need conflicting versions of various components; there is no technical solution for this other than not mixing and putting the two mutually exclusive 'things' on two different boxes, real or virtual.