Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Les Mikesell]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 16:25 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> If Red Hat Linux had a history of providing additional services to users 
>> and thus you expected it to provide a repository for fedora version X, 
>> would you subvert that ability by forking some of its existing packages 
>> into incompatible versions duplicated into your own repository?
> 
> Fedora cannot point to, make reference of, or otherwise "endorse"
> software repos external to Fedora's control.  This introduces a legal
> risk.  We also can't make use of external packages to build our
> dependent packages as this also introduces a security risk to our
> buildsystem.  Therefor if it's software that is suitable to be in
> Fedora, the only way we can officially provide it for Fedora users is by
> having it in Fedora.  This is why we have an open package submission
> system and an open build system and an open distribution.  All other
> attempts at this game have failed in various ways.

But even given the constraint that the fedora repo is self-consistent 
and contains all its own dependencies I don't see why that necessarily 
forces any incompatibilities with external repos.  It looks like it just 
happened because no one cared about coordinating with them.

The bigger issue for me is that you also can't or won't include 
everything that those external repos provide.  That shouldn't be a 
surprise to anyone and it makes the incompatibilities a big problem. 
It's one thing to 'not endorse' anything outside and something very 
different to actively break their attempts to provide additional content 
for your users which is what forking their upstream packages amounts to, 
given the limitations of yum in sorting this stuff out.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com