Red Hat Launches New Package Repository for Enterprise Linux

[Manuel Wolfshant]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 22:01 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
>   
>> Well, we know this happens anyway, just people are pulling (and
>> rebuilding) packages from all sorts of random locations.
>>     
>
> Oh, I wholly agree this is drastically improved.  The Fedora standards
> and processes are much, much better than your typical "oh, it built"
> attitude of select RPMForge/3rd Party repositories.
>   
Sorry to contradict you, but you are not fair. The attitude in major 3rd 
party repos is far from "oh, it built". I am constantly using several of 
them (especially rpmforge, sometimes atrpms, centosplus and kb) for a 
couple of years and the number of problems created by them was very very 
low. And the quality of specs for many of the packages in those 
repositories is lots of times excellent. I know I repeat myself, but 
axel, dag,dries, hughes jr, karanbir,and thias (alphabetically listed) 
do a great job and I am once again happy to extend my thanks to them for 
their work.


>> EPEL is actually a great way for a consultant to help a company get a
>> desired package available.  One of the reasons for this "standard job
>> description":
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/PackageMaintainer/GenericJobDescription
>>     
>
> An EPEL package could become stale or otherwise cause an update to fail,
> etc...  Especially if it is a dependency for another EPEL package that
> is still being maintained, etc...
>
> Now I understand there are no "alternative" packages to what is in RHEL
> and no RHEL package can be replaced or dependent on a EPEL package.  But
> there's still that issue.
EPEL is just an effort to bring in the RHEL world the packages from the 
former Fedora Extras while also trying to the best of our (I speak now 
as a Fedora Collection maintainer and as a member of EPEL SIG ) 
abilities to also respect the long term commitment of RHEL (in terms of 
ABI etc).