But in the short term, yum is now part of severn. Since it will be the default with the system, it will eventually become the standard. As soon as RH offers the chance for people to create repositories, the number of public repositories will explode. By the time we decide for a standard, yum repositories would have become the defacto standard.
This is one of the exact reasons why we've started figuring out a standard repository format for all pkg tools. I don't care if yum is a 'standard' or not. I'd like it to be reasonable for me to keep on developing yum w/o having to mess about with 4 different repository formats on a mirror. From what I can tell the ximian, red hat and apt people agree. So we're working on consensus to solve our problems together.
It probably won't be available for severn but I'd like for it be available before the beta for the version after cambridge.
-sv