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

Wed Feb 26 23:10:58 UTC 2014
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Alexander Arlt <centos at track5.de> wrote:
>
>> You can't really understand the future interactions of multiple
>> uncoordinated things.
>
> To be honest, most of the time it's quite a challenge to understand the
> future interactions of multiple coordinated things. At least for me.

So far, I haven't seen a lot of problems across EPEL/CentOS-*/elrepo,
although I guess I haven't let the versions of backuppc in extras and
epel fight it out on the same box.    And I expect them to continue to
make an effort to avoid conflicts except for EPEL not considering
centos-extras to be 'upstream'.  Maybe even that will change now.

>> But this is not something that every individual
>> user should have gamble on independently or work out separate
>> solutions for frequently-needed configurations.
>
> True. Is this solvable? I doubt so. What is a "frequently-needed"
> configuration? Again this would bring up Karanbir, saying this needs to
> be measurable. And he would be right. Just because something is posted
> repeatedly on the mailing list doesn't make it "frequently-needed".

I don't claim to know all of the details of possible conflicts, but I
think it is a reasonable topic for discussion as to whether it would
be practical for a central automated test to determine the potential
conflicts across multiple remote repositories.   And if it is, then we
could move on to how the repository managers and users could use that
information to best advantage.

>> Maybe the US isn't the right location for it, or a US company the
>> right management entity.
>
> I don't think there are a lot of places on this planet where you can
> actually bring the wonderful world of multimedia together without
> breaking laws. We have paid a lot of tax-money to our rightful
> representatives to screw things up as good as possible.

The whole point of this discussion is about avoiding duplication of
effort - starting with each user not having to sort out every possible
conflict himself.   In that light it seems to make sense to look
toward the distributions that have already put some effort into
sorting out how and where to distribute more packages in a coordinated
way.

> Actually it's kinda hard for me to imagine a setup kinda
> legal/illegal-repos, which will not break each other, will be maintained
> with proper care - and will be enterprise stable.

You don't have to imagine it.  Other distributions are already doing
that - with some room for argument about stability and their release
cycles.

> Because it still will
> be CentOS. If you put a tick somewhere in some checkbox and by that
> enable some whatever repository - when this goes south, it will most
> probably be CentOS to take the blame, not the external repo.

The point here is for it not to go south in the first place.  Do you
think leaving it as an exercise for newbies is really the best
approach for that?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com