[CentOS] Re: are RPMForge and EPEL compatible?

Karanbir Singh mail-lists at karan.org
Thu Dec 6 22:08:49 UTC 2007


Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Dec 6, 2007 12:51 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>>
>>>> The point is that as an end user, I want a sensible way to deal with
>>>> multiple repositories that _don't_ collaborate.  After all, if everyone
>>>> agreed on policies we wouldn't need any third party repositories at all.
>>> Ok the problem field is that you have N different repositories, using
>>> M different guidelines, using O different compile flags, and P
>>> different filesystem layouts.
>> The constraint is simply that you do not replace any file/library with
>> one that is incompatible.
> 
> And how do you know it isnt compatible? Keeping ABI's the same is
> extremely hard work and basically would mean that a repository rarely
> puts up new stuff but only backports items from upstream. Thats a lot
> of work for something they don't get paid for. And even if the ABI is
> the same, it doesnt mean that you have different actions occur because
> one had a compiler with XYZ flag in it and the other had XZY.
> 
>> The Sun people like to claim that you can run
>> anything that ever ran on Solaris on subsequent versions so the problem
>> space isn't as impossible as you make it seem - it is more a matter of
>> respecting interfaces and backwards compatibility.
> 
> And that was a load of bull from Solaris. You could run most Sun
> things from Solaris 2.x to 2.x1 but the list of things that didn't run
> as expected was always pretty long. And to do that they had to
> basically strip down the OS to extremely limited functionality. That
> was why it was such a 'radical' change when they started shipping GNU
> tools in the OS because it had been requested for years but the amount
> of churn was too high for them to want to deal with.
> 
>> But my point is that
>> I don't want to be forced to use a repository that always follows this
>> constraint.  Sometimes compatibility is what you want, sometimes you
>> want something different, and you need to be able to manage both.
>>
> 
> But are you willing to pay for that? Because its not an easy problem
> to solve that people can throw more computers at and get it working.
> It usually requires a lot of meat-ware time with people working out
> meat-ware politics and issues.
> 
>>> The best you could possibly do is not
>>> have packages at all but keep each package in a dmg file and let the
>>> ld fight it out over who gets executed today... but that would seem to
>>> be a different OS.
>> Yes, that would make Linux as difficult to maintain as a Mac.
>>
> 
> Maintainability is usually on the opposite side of choices.
> 
> 
> 

guys, while somewhat relevant - this list is really not the place for 
this conversation. As has happened before its going to go round in 
circles with lots of noise - but no action.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq



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