[CentOS] Re: Mixing RPMforge and EPEL (Was: EPEL repo)

Thu Aug 2 05:37:57 UTC 2007
"Petr \"Qaxi\" Klíma" <qaxi at seznam.cz>

Les Mikesell napsal(a):
>>
>> Correct, you would think Fedora took care of this, right ? But there 
>> is no interest for Fedora to take care of that because they want to 
>> be the only repository. It is not something they have an incentive 
>> for to fix.
>>
>> That is exactly the problem. The repotag would be a workaround (and a 
>> convenient one for users) but the real changes need to be in yum or 
>> somewhere else. And Fedora does not care, so RHEL will not have it.
>>
>> I have warned for this on the Feodra mailinglist years ago. There 
>> just is no interest to have the diversity of more than one repository.
>
> What value does diversity add when the end user can't select which one 
> he wants or load all of them?  I understand the scenario where a 
> single repository has a policy that prohibits certain packages from 
> being included, but the only conflicts in those cases should be where 
> an incomplete version is packaged in one place under the same name as 
> the full version in a place with a different policy.  The more common 
> case would just be additional packages or packages with different names.
>
> From an end-user viewpoint, I can't see why anyone would want to 
> maintain a potentially-conflicting package of something that can be 
> freely distributed and keep it in an isolated repository, especially 
> without any mechanism to control which will be installed. Can you 
> explain the reason anyone would want to have diversity instead of a 
> single maintainer per package and the same packages in all 
> repositories whose policies find them acceptable?
>
Diversity adds a lot of value. If EPEL will be only repo nobody on RHEL 
workstation can see/listen MP3, WMA, DVD playing, because of interesting 
US software patent and millenium act law.

-- 

   Petr Klíma

   e-mail:  qaxi at seznam.cz