[CentOS-devel] Is it possible to merge elrepo.org contribute to centos main repository?

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 02/26/2014 12:55 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 02/26/2014 09:59 AM, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>> We do not vouch for their quality and we will not support what they
>> ship. We will just make easier for people to use them
> you are missing the point - what are we making easier ?
The life of those who want to use packages not provided by stock centos. 
Each and every day on the IRC ( and in the forums, afaik ) there are 
people who ask for packages available only in 3rd party repos and they 
get sent to the wiki page related to 3rd party repos


> there are more than 100 repos out there, which ones are we going to add
Those who provide the most desired packages and have been qualified by 
the community as being in good shape. The list can be as long as one 
desires but from my point of view it boils down to
a) additional hardware support
b) multimedia not supported out of the box
c) applications not existing in the core repos
d) newer versions of the apps that are already included
I would start by targeting the first 3 classes above. And for a) there 
is exactly one provider, elrepo. Who does a very good job, from my point 
of view. In terms of additional hardware support the only choices are 
the centosplus kernel and elrepo, which covers a rather large target via 
their kmods

> and why
Because people would reach for them anyway , via 
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories or via 
more-or-less good advices received from other sources.
Instead of forcing them to read in fast speed that page and then in the 
same fast speed another page specific to the repo just to end doing wget 
whatever-release.rpm && yum localinstall whatever-release.rpm we give 
them a hand and replace all the mumbo jumbo with "yum install 
whatever-release". No matter how much we like pointing people to 
documentation, experience in #centos has shown that most of them will 
ignore anything not related to the very exact instructions on how to 
install the repo.
And if you want to know why ELRepo and EPEL and not others: because 
these two ( plus IUS ) are the ones most frequently recommended by those 
of us who offer support via IRC.
Leaving aside that SL includes references to these two repos for quite 
some time , this mere thread is a proof that there is a need that should 
be addressed.


>   and then at that point what do the others need to do in order to also get included ?
For a start, they should not blindly replace core packages. Second they 
should have | earned a good reputation. And both repositories that have 
been suggested fit these bills. Their reputation was earned over the 
years and they ship packages which people need/use, not just fancy stuff 
included just because it could be done.