On 03/04/2010 04:28 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 16:19 -0500, Peter Jones wrote:
>> yup, this is very likely. One reason Mandriva's backports repository
>> was initiated was because, when MDV allowed only conservative
>> updates and had no official facility for adventurous updates, a
>> forest of third-party repos offering new versions of things sprung
>> up. Obviously this led to confusion for people doing user support
>> ('wait, exactly *whose* KDE 4.3 packages were you running again?')
>> and all> sorts of fun with incompatibilities between the third party
>> repos.
>
> Just playing devil's advocate here - what's the virtue of trying to
> avoid separate repos? It seems like there's a false dichotomy (trichotomy?)
> going on here, where our choices are:
>
> 1) this is in the main Fedora(tm) repo
> 2) we have a special repo for updates vs upgrades, each against stable
> 3) A free for all of third party repos hosted at various different
> places with huge conflicts and no coöperation whatsoever. Repos
> everywhere, dogs and cats living together, Cain has been marked
> and kicked out of the garden, total chaos.
>
> As a little gedankenexperiment, let's explore for a second a 4th option:
> Fedora-blessed/hosted/sponsored/whatever repos for things that we don't
> feel should be mandated on users, but which some users may want and some
> maintainers want to be able to provide. A little bit of all three -
> including a built-in need to be minimalist in construction, so as to
> avoid conflict nightmares, but at the same time freedom to say "here's
> a new major version of this, since we _know_ that's what you're looking
> for if you've got this repo enabled".
>
> Obviously this would require some tools work, but isn't it worth
> considering?
What does option 4 provide over option 2?
In fact, how is it even functionally different? 'Fedora' repositories
are effectively nothing more than 'blessed' repositories anyway, given
the considerable powers granted to maintainers.
Option two is one more repo for all "updates". Which may be well and
good, but might also be less interesting than a more general approach. In
#4, what I'm suggesting is essentially the possibility of a SIG having
overlay repos for whatever distro version(s) they want; they could be
experimental, they could be for upgrades that don't conform to a more
strict update policy, it could be for things even *I* haven't thought of
yet ;)
--
Peter
Old MacDonald had an agricultural real-estate tax abatement.