3rd party repositories vs the floppy disk

[Jonas Karlsson]

Hello all,
This is my first post to this list, hopefully some of you can agree to 
what I'm writing.

I've been an Unix user since early 90's and did test Linux for the first 
time in 1993. I've also been running fedora since core 1 and has been a 
frequent user of radhat distributions over the years. Not that I've 
never used other distributions, well I have and most of you guys have. 
Back in the early Linux years it was debian on firewalls and slackware 
for coding and redhat for the graphical stuff, well that have since 
changed. Today I feel happy just running Fedora and release 7 for the 
moment. But one thing that has always nagged at me is why do the Linux 
community often have a hard time at working toghether. This is probably 
the one thing that still makes Linux not go all the way in many offices, 
because of 3rd party problematics.

I (after all my years) still do have big troubble selecting a 3rd party 
repository every time a new version of fedora comes around. Do I use 
this or that with this version of fedora, which works best.. and help me 
upstairs.. you have to choose because they are not campatible and might 
break your system and kill all of your dependencies, shit!..

Does this sound familiar? No? ..  YES!!!

This is year 2007 and the problematics above describes scenarios that 
should have been gone many years ago.. It's like the floppy disk. That 
sucker still remains in pc systems even today. If you need to install 
(dont speak #¤%#¤ in the church!, well I'm a scientist so I guess I 
can.) Windows with advanced scsi options, your driver is on a floppy.. 
Darn, well luckily for me I do try not to use MS$ server as often as 
possible so that problem is soon past me.

Ok back on track (3rd party repositories) It's way over time to have 
guys like livna, freshrpms, rpmforge and atrpms etc start a collective, 
collaborative and functional repository (for the greater good). There 
are many guys doing the same work that the other one already has done, 
and some times one repository does not work, the next time it's the 
other way around. Just start one big community 3rd party repository, 
define rules, let everyone contribute and mirror it.

Now that we finally are past Core and Extras and it is merged into one. 
The next step shold be to clean up the above described mess that is 
doing harm to the Fedora users and the general community by creating 
confusion and eventually breaks your installation. So please guys keep 
up the good work, but do it together!

// Jonas