Warren' rejection of cooperation with other repos

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 8 Nov 2003 13:09:54 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:

> > On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Warren Togami wrote:
> > > I would assert that the alliances of 3rd party repositories that
> > > have tried to form in the recent past are not sustainable in the
> > > long term, for the same controversial reasons that fedora.us
> > > rejected cooperation with those entities earlier this year.
> 
> I am sorry to hear that you still think you were doing the Right
> Thing (TM).
> 
> When Fedora (US) was being formed it attracted many repo maintainers
> like freshrpms, newrpms, dag and many others including myself. They
> hoped for a coordination institution within fedora, which should
> provide
> 
> o interrepository specifications (note "inter"!!!)
> o merger proposals
> o common infrastructure
> 
> In that sense a lot of input was provided for the versioning scheme.
> 
> Instead the project was driven towards a competitive repo, refusing to
> add components that would make the specification more general, because
> "there could only be one repository". You also managed to create the
> largest repository compatibility problems ever (I just say epoch: 0),
> that you were supposedly trying to avoid.

While I'd like to stay out of this, because I've not been part of the
pre-fedora.us discussions, I skimmed over the list archives when I
subscribed to the list. May not count much, but it was -- and still is --
my impression that the maintainers of existing repos were not willing to
compromise. That made it really difficult for fedora.us to start.

> Many people left the fedora.us project because of that attitude. If
> the project had been more open we would be much further today than we
> are.

I find it very unfortunate to see that a lot of work is still duplicated.
If someone asked me whether I could explain why there are still several
independent repo maintainers who do their own rather closed thing, I would
admit that I don't know.

Fedora.us provides the infrastructure for collaborated packaging
efforts. Still, the reason why some repo maintainers don't team up, is not
the "explicit Epoch" or the package release versioning scheme. It's the
refusal to adhere to Fedora.us package submission and QA policies, because
it's easier to pipe out a new binary package instead of depending on other
people to review the src.rpm, and possibly having to fix broken build
requirements or unclean spec files before a package would be approved.

It would be really helpful if you, Axel, (or Dag or Matthias) would create
a complete list of points you dislike about current Fedora.us policies.
That would be interesting to understand what will be necessary to get you
to contribute to the Fedora Project rather than keeping alive your
independent repositories.
 
> I am not speaking about or flaming fedora.us' community here, only
> about the emerged leadership. Most fedora.us packagers have avoided
> participating in Warren's crusade against other repos.

"Crusade" is the wrong term, IMO. Fedora.us started as a vision. A vision
to serve the Red Hat Community with add-on packages from a single
repository which would make it easy for users to find additional software.

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