3rd party repositories vs the floppy disk

[Rahul Sundaram]

Jonas Karlsson wrote:

> 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!

There is some ongoing efforts on consolidating some of the popular third 
party repositories. I guess they have been waiting to get off the ground 
solidly before announcing their efforts.

Keep in mind there is always going to be other third party repositories 
for Fedora. Popular distributions tend to attract people with different 
policies. A number of Fedora contributors have their own repositories 
because they haven't had the time to work through package reviews, 
licensing etc. There are tools like yum priorities plugin which can help 
you deal with them if you really need to mix these repositories.

Rahul