3rd party repositories vs the floppy disk

[Jonas Karlsson]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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
>
This is good news and might shed some light on the current situation. Do 
you know if there is a timeframe or roadmap for this or if it still in 
the talks.

The yum priorities plugin is a nice feature, but shouldn't been 
necessary in a perfect world (isn't that the direction of Linux? :) )

Other 3rd party repositories will arise and probably start another 
confusion in the future. In my opinion I just feel that it is a lot of 
waste with time and energy to package the same packages in different 
repositories by different people (as it is now) instead of mirroring it 
and dividing the workload. And if other 3rd party repositories arise 
they do not need to make their own version of the same packages already 
present in another repo, only add the packages that is unique. That way 
there can be no confusion.
How about a large database where packagers can add their packages that 
they have in their repo with no dobblets allowed, everything working 
together? And most importantly the links to add the repos in yum.

//Jonas