1 Big repo vs multiple small ones

[Marcela Mašláňová]

On 03/20/2014 12:24 AM, Tadej Janež wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-03-18 at 16:22 +0100, Marcela Mašláňová wrote:
>> Today was discussed whether we want one big repo or multiple small ones
>> [1].
>
> I hope we all agree that the general idea behind the Playground repo is
> to have some middle ground between current Fedora's main repo and COPRs.
> However, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details, i.e. we need
> to find out what this middle ground is.
>
I concur.
> My vision for the Playground repo is to provide a single "big"
> repository with a little more integration work being done at the repo
> level than to just provide a curated collection of multiple COPRs.
>
> In my view, two of the main things driving the creation of the
> Playground repo are:
> 1) Some things take a very long time to get into Fedora because of the
> current (suboptimal) review process.
> 2) Some things simply cannot go into Fedora because of the current
> (strict) FPG.
>
> We can solve those two things and at the same time retain one big
> integration point offered by the packages in the Fedora's main
> repository:
> "Users should always be able to install the latest packages from
> Fedora's repos regardless of what other Fedora packages are
> installed." [1]
>
I wouldn't fight for integration here. If you want to do integration 
here, then the process is not much different from inclusion of packages 
into rawhide.

> For the Playground repository I would modify that to:
> "Users should always be able to install the latest packages from the
> Playground repository regardless of what other packages from the
> Playground repository and the Fedora's main repository are installed."
>
I disagree. Not all latest versions of packages must go through 
Playground repo. In some cases it might be more work than needed. I 
would leave it up to maintainers with dozens of packages, what they think.
> I admit this will be hard to achieve but I think this is the area where
> we have to do the integration work so that the users of the Playground
> repository don't have to do it themselves.
> For example, Fedora really won't make a good impression on a user that
> has to decipher an error message about unresolved conflicts in the
> transaction set when he tries to install *some cool new package*.
>
> How to achieve this?
> We'll need to develop tooling that will automatically detect when there
> are conflicting files between multiple packages or just conflicting
> package names and suggest to the packager what are the possible
> solutions to resolve it.
> And in cases when a package carries an explicit Conflicts: tag, we might
> just flag it for manual review.
>
I still don't buy the idea - no conflicts in repo.

> Tadej
>
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Conflicts#Conflicts
>
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Marcela