JPackage and Fedora

[Jesus M. Rodriguez]

Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 10:01 -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
>> On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Lee Faus wrote:
> 
>>> Why Fedora wants to duplicate work that is already established and 
>>> replicate disk space just doesn't make sense.
>> Perhaps this is exactly right.
> 
> As a devil's advocate, why shouldn't that repository be Fedora?  In this
> case, why not have JPackage merge in to Fedora in some way, either
> directly or as a branch project similar to EPEL?

Having it merge directly in Fedora would exclude other distros, would
it not? If it more closely resembles EPEL, I could see it still being
able to accomplish it's goals of being more distro agnostic.

> There is a precedent in EPEL of supporting CentOS and other RHEL
> derivatives.  Could that be extended for a JPackage branch to cover all
> RPM-based distros?

Interesting idea, worth exploring.

> To some degree it is six of one, half dozen of the other.  Things to
> keep in mind are:
> 
> * Strength of the JPackage brand
> * Do the two repositories work well together now?  

As a user of said packages, unless one adds excludes/includes to the
repositories they don't always work together. There are times
conflicts arise.

> * Would making JPackage the "official Fedora Java package repository"
> _improve_ interactions between the two projects?
> * Could we separate Java packages in to JPackage in a way similar to
> Fedora and Livna?

I would like to see that. I mean it is nice to be able to install
for example, eclipse by default when I install Fedora *without* having
to use a different repository. But trying to keep one repo up2date
with the other is becoming challenging.

> The latter question is, I think, the killer.  We've never experimented
> with Fedora having packages with dependencies in another repository.
> It's going to take a high level of trust and agreed process/philosophy
> to make that work.


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jesus m. rodriguez     | jesusr at redhat.com
sr. software engineer  | irc: zeus
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