Relationship to existing 3rd party repos/CentOS/SL?

[Axel Thimm]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:14:14AM -0700, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 11:49 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 01:04:49PM -0700, C.M. Connelly wrote:
> > > Speaking as an end-user/sysadmin, I'm not clear on why the repotag
> > > issue is as controversial as it appears to be.
> > > 
> > > From my perspective, RHEL (really mostly CentOS) is the base OS.
> > > On top of that, I expect to layer EPEL packages, very likely some
> > > packages from RPMForge, and packages from my own local repos (for
> > > special needs or for packages that just aren't (and maybe can't
> > > be) available from other sources).
> > > 
> > > Having read all the messages on the topic, I agree that the
> > > current EPEL steering committee is not out to take over the world
> > > or *intends* to imply that other repositories are less important,
> > > but I can definitely see how Axel and Dag can *feel* like that's
> > > where the committee is coming from, because that's how it feels to
> > > me.
> > 
> > It is more than a bad feeling. If one repo drops repotags the whole
> > repotag system is broken. So the continued lack of repotags forces the
> > other repos to follow along even though they are strong belivers of
> > repotags.
> > [MUNCH]
> 
> I don't get this. 
> 
> If one repo drops repotags (or a newcomer does not adopt them as this
> seems to be the case to me :-), then that repo does not have repotags.
> So? That does not force anyone to drop them to match their choice. If
> there is just _one_ repo that does not use repotags then the "system"
> still works, anything without repotags belongs to that repo, if more
> repos do that then things get progressively more confusing. If/when I
> package for rhel I will keep using ".ccrma" in there. 

freshrpms recently dropped repotags. Ever since for the packages that
atrpms and freshrpms share I get reports like "why does atrpms replace
ffmpeg and lame from the official Fedora Core distribution". I have
these in bugzilla, atrpms list, fedora lists and pm.

For users knowledgable about what Fedora can contain or not, this is
less an issue, but all the novice, incomplete reports (which are a
supporters nightmare) make it to the nice playing party.

As it doesn't only affect 3rd party repos cross-relationship, but even
the relationship to the vendor itself. E.g. EPEL packages become
indistinguishable for RHEL packages and I bet that there will be
tickets opened against RHEL because the user thought that
foo-1.2.3-4.el5 breaking in presence of bar-1.2.3-4.el5 is a problem
of foo, while after wasting RHEL support time it will be discovered
that while foo is indeed from RHEL, bar was from EPEL and the whole
constallation was unsupported to begin with.

But the latter only affects the relationship of EPEL to RHEL.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/attachments/20070425/138cbb84/attachment.sig>