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

On Mar 24, 2011, at 1:02 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On 3/24/2011 11:54 AM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 9:50 AM, Les Mikesell<lesmikesell at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On 3/24/2011 10:44 AM, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>>>>>> 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?
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> There weren't really "external" repositories when yum came out.  I
>> won't speak for Seth, but in my opinion, the goal of yum was "help end
>> RPM dep hell".  And thankfully it did (combined with lots of packaging
>> improvements in rh/fedora, etc.).
> 
> Really?  I thought freshrpms was around (and wonderful) back when you 
> had to use some apt derivative to use it.
> 

Yum was deployed around the same time as "repositories" were
invented. Dag et al are perhaps the oldest (and imho most useful)
"repositories" around.

The flaw with "repositories" is that its pretty easy to devise
a split at the 1st level of "add-on". The next level of "add-on" to "add-on"
is usually a disaster because of duplication and lack of coordination.

One can assign a preference mechanism like "repository priority" which
looks attractive on paper: One can then tell (when faced with otherwise
identical choices in a depsolver) which package to install by "priority".

But priority in the "real world" of multiple repositories is too arbitrary
and not based on intrinsic details like dependency closure and difficult
to administer reliably:
	 Who *exactly* chooses the priority? What criteria are the basis?

And freshrpms was wonderful and Matthias is truly a gentleman, his involvement
is missed. But everyone moves on to other interests than Linux eventually.

73 de Jeff