On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 00:55, Rik van Riel wrote:
Indeed, since the project went live around the same time as the Severn beta (beta == code freeze) this time the core release probably won't have all that much community input. Personally I hope this will result in a culture of using external repositories so the core distribution for the next version could be shrunk ;))
Am I the only one who reels in horror at this thought? I can't see any outcome from doing this other then encouraging even more slightly incompatible competing external repositories. None of them having everything you want or need, causing you to either have to 'graft' in parts of one into another or grab the most you can from one and having to play with spec files and building your own packages for the other.
Have you gone through the horror of getting XD2, fedora, freshrpms, and a couple others working on the same system without weird application behaviors, crashes, and apt/yum freaking out?
Sorry if this was beaten to death already in past threads but my interested in "RHL: The Project" centers around the hope these external repositories are (for the most part) _eliminated_ and we have one central repository where library versions and other dependencies, etc all match.
We need a sane dependency tree for the vast amount of software out there for Red Hat that doesn't require "--forcing" and "--nodeps" or end-users spending time with "rpmbuild". (Small repositories will of course still exist for those _really_ niche packages). Encouraging the development of even more external repositories sounds like a sure way of increasing the pain of "RPM dependency hell".
As a former Gentoo developer (I'm not trying to make that sound like it means something in this forum, I'm only to provide an example from personal experience), I found Gentoo initially attractive because it allowed for a configurable feature set and flexible dependency tree system but it was _one repository_... one tree.
I moved back to Red Hat from Gentoo due to a lack of time and not wanting to worry about such things. As a Red Hat user I gave up some flexibility with the hope of saving time and using a stable and integrated system ("It just works") or at least one that was predictable broken ("Well... it doesn't work but I can count on being broken the same on every version X system and this workaround will work on most/all of them..."). Having to depend on external repositories that can (and have proven to be historically) not "integrated" between themselves and incompatible with constantly changing versions for key libraries and applications destroys that advantage.
Basically, in my view, it creates anarchy where I don't want to be exposed to such anarchy. Distributions were originally supposed to be tested snapshots of software from the open source world and not just a means to sell a support contract right?... right?! <Joke> The conspiracy theorist in me could argue Red Hat was expecting this anarchy and wants it because it would help push their Enterprise product to people who couldn't afford to deploy it on every machine... :P </Joke>
On the plus side though, I have been very impressed by willingness of Red Hat employees to discuss things that would have been 'confidential information' only a short time ago. Thanks.