Re: Fedora Extras is extra

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Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 05:41:57 +0100
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 16:11:25 -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:

> OK, someone pointed this out to me:
>
> <http://www.fedora.us/wiki/RepositoryMixingProblems>
>
> Join us or we'll start reproducing your software in your place anyways.
> Does this not scream arrogance, bureacracy, and monopoly to anybody
> else? Does this not seem very Microsoft-ish?

You try to read between the lines and end up with something which is
not what the page tries to point out. It makes your thoughts and your
choice of words appear unnecessarily aggressive.

> Can you actually expect
> to have a single community to maintain every single piece of free
> software for Fedora Core (talk about a super bloat to the Fedora
> Project)?

That question is full of prejudice, it cannot be answered in a single
sentence. There is only a "single community", the Fedora community,
the community of Fedora Core users. How we, the community, manage to
organize ourselves, is another question. Whether individual packagers
wish to contribute their packages to a central repository or create an
own repository on their website is up to them. The distribution
explicitly includes tools, which aid 3rd party packagers. Some
software only targets niche markets. Other software, e.g. binary only
releases or non-redistributable software, could not be included in
Fedora Core and not Fedora Extras either. And there will always be
room for independent packagers, who choose a different road of
packaging.

Basically, it some piece of free software is not popular enough and
nobody (not even its developers) is willing to maintain packages for
it, it won't be included.

> Doesn't this seem to go against some of the good things about
> free software?

What? You think that software X, which is included in repository A, must
not be included in repository B?

> It seems that a set of extra libraries and applications
> that aren't "Core" but are still fundamental or very widely used should
> be the focus of Fedora Extras. Basically, take some software that is
> very redundantly distributed by other repositories to reduce overlap and
> increase compatibility, and not try to take over every package that
> every other repository makes.
>
> Discuss...

I don't understand this last paragraph, I'm afraid. And I don't see
anyone at fedora.us trying to taking "every package that every other
repository makes".

Spend some time thinking about inter-repository coordination and
scalability of inter-repository dependencies. People have thought about
it before. The Wiki page you've found gives only a rough summary of the
problems. Present a complete guide on how to solve inter-repository
collaboration, also with respect to the different repository development
models. That would be food for discussion. But don't be afraid of
analyzing why there is not a single repository only. Discussing
conspiracy theories is a waste of time.

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• Previous message: Nathan Low: "security settings"
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