Fedora review

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/22/05, Jeremy Hogan <jeremy.hogan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Couldn't the user add the repo names themselves? Adding third party
> repositories is a legit feature in and of itself, so we could have a
> list of repos of official Fedora mirrors and channels like Extras and
> Alternatives (and stable/test/release etc), that was autopolulated,
> and a field for a user to add other URLs. Then we're just talking
> about a GUI for repo management.

Its not simply one field. You'd have to add the name, the baseurl or
mirrorlist url, whether or not you wanted gpgsig checking on, and then
the gpgkey url and so on. The repo definition files have multiple
settings that can be applied.  Sure.. you could expose the full guts
of creating a repo definition file via a gui and then require the
users who create repo definitions that way to manually update those
definitions by hand during upgrades to the next core release, but you
might as well just give them instructions on how to use gedit at that
point.

But that doesnt solve the problem of finding those repos.  We can't
tell users about those 3rd party repos anywhere inside Core or the
official website. And for repos that offer  reponame-release packages,
it is far better to encourage people install that package to create
the predefined repo configs which can be updated by the repo
maintainer than it is to have users botching the writing of repo
definitions by hand because they don't use things like the $releasever
variables as appropriate to ease upgrade path to the next release.

The only users you really are going to help by exposing a full gui for
creating a repo definition file are those users who are already know
enough about which repos they want to actually edit a repo config by
hand anyways.  A mechanism to make it easy for users to click on a
link on the 3rd party repo website to download and install the
provided reponame-release.. serves all users. Users of a repo should
be encouraged to use a repo config provided and updatable by the repo
maintainer instead of making one by hand.

-jef