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