On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 03:57:09PM -0700, Radu-Cristian FOTESCU wrote: > I am sorry to decline your offer: I don't need access to a > 8,000-package repo, for later I could be accused of some > breakage I might have not caused. Unless RF starts from zero > (that is, by tossing whatever does not build), I am not > interested: better not touch it. Following this line of thought no new people would ever join, let's say, the GCC development team, unless the GCC project starts from scratch. Luckily, this is far from being the case. And yes, GCC underwent quite a few changes from v2 to v3 and v4, changes that broke things along their path and, finally, led to the great compiler we have today. The same would hold for any large project (the kernel, firefox, etc.) > Otherwise, everyone is free to rebuild from: > http://odiecolon.lastdot.org/el5/SRPMS/ > > If it doesn't work... c'est la vie. This is the first time > in my life that I've built RPMs, so... [...] > You know, in the F/LOSS world the idea is that the sources be > available *and* that they would build. If your repo is in the F/LOSS world, then in your view it should rebuild flawlessly, forever. "C'est la vie" is out of question. Fortunately, the way F/LOSS works is: the source is there, please contribute. The only thing certain is that anyone who cares can put spare time into it, with the best of intentions and that new contributions cannot be kept out. You may be *entitled* to demand quality from the products you *buy*, but that's an entirely different thing. > Whatever I could fix and build and I was interested in, > would normally get into my tiny repo. SRPMs available. Good luck. I fail to see why tens of micro repos are easier to maintain consistent than a large one. Besides, they will have a grand total of tens of people involved, which would definitely solve the next issue: > > But don't expect me (or dries, christoph, fabian, ...) to > > fix it because that simply *does* *not* *scale*. > > 7,600 packages is really too much for a couple of people to > maintain. Unless it's scaled *down*... ...or scale the maintainers up. Cheers, Mihai