On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 6:40 AM, Dag Wieers <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 13 May 2009, Robin Price II wrote:
>
>> For RHEL, I would highly suggest using both EPEL and RPMFUSION together.
>> They do not play nice with the Dag repo installed along side them.  I
>> spoke
>> with Dag a while back regarding the conflicts I was having but I didn't
>> see
>> much interest to get things cleared up.  Hopefully Dag follows the
>> mailing-list closely and can comment more on it.
>
> There is no interest from the EPEL side either, which is a shame. When I
> started I was basicly the only repository doing packages for Red Hat and
> RHEL, that was somewhere in 2003.
>
> Then when Fedora was born there was no interest within the Fedora community
> to support a paid-for distribution even when the effort would have been
> minimal. That was the main reason why with RPMforge we couldn't work
> together with the Fedora project because our main focus was RHEL (and later
> also CentOS).

There was interest, but there was not enough time/resources to do so.
Also when Fedora began the 'community' was rather non-existant as it
was an experiment on how Red Hat could keep up with new developments
while maintaining another OS for ~10 years. Later 'extras' were added
on as another step in the pool to keep things moving.

> The fact that the Fedora project started EPEL 2 years ago was a slap in the
> face since those packages break existing systems that were using RPMforge
> (mostly CentOS anyway). Fedora is not adding a repotag, which means we get
> to blame when there are package conflicts (people think no repotag means
> these packages come from Red Hat).

While I can't comment on the emotional content that repo maintainers
felt, the impasse later became two way. If we go over the clamav
package if we didn't ship it DAG way we were broken and if we didn't
ship it Fedora way we were broken. I would have preferred to have gone
with the DAG layout but it would have required changing the fedora
side and dealing with tons of broken things. And I will agree that I
would have preferred to have had a repotag, but I lost that vote and
it is too late to add it in.

In the end you should NOT mix repositories anymore than you should set
up your production systems to pull directly from any of the
repositories. As DAG has said many time before and after the EPEL
kerfluffle.. pulling in multiple repos without vetting beforehand is
asking for trouble. One should use a tool to mirror the repos, and
then come up with processes for your organization to put accepted and
tested packages into your own repository.

> Also the fact that EPEL is a Fedora initiative is not only confusing, it
> tries to bring together two communities that are inherently different :-(

I will disagree with the above. There were and are multiple
communities here... not just 2 (fedora and yours). The other
communities are the various groups who for whatever silly reason could
not use RPMforge/DAG rpms without extra vetting but for whatever
reason could use a recompiled fedora rpm on the enterprise. Those
communities existed before and exist still. In the most part I can see
where EPEL is meant to serve them...

> Nowadays, RPMforge is mostly recommended and used on CentOS systems while
> EPEL is promoted through the Fedora project and Red Hat.
>
> I like diversity but if it means choice is mutual exclusive everyone looses.
>

Sadly the mutual exclusion usually comes down to packaging standards
where reasonable  will come up with different ways to lay something
out. In the same way that if everyone in the world used .deb/.con/.rpm
we would still end up with not being able to put a SuSE package on a
Red Hat system or a Ubuntu system. It ends up being a human problem
that has been around since before recorded history, and probably not
going to end anytime soon.



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

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