3rd party repositories vs the floppy disk

Jeroen van Meeuwen kanarip at kanarip.com
Tue Jun 19 13:46:13 UTC 2007


Jonas Karlsson wrote:
> Hello all,
> This is my first post to this list, hopefully some of you can agree to 
> what I'm writing.
> 
> [...] But one thing that has always nagged at me is why do the Linux 
> community often have a hard time at working toghether. [...]

Erhm, last time I saw people having a hard time working together, within 
moments they had signed a deal between the two of them resulting in one 
of them waving with coupons.

> I (after all my years) still do have big troubble selecting a 3rd party 
> repository every time a new version of fedora comes around.

How is that possible? I know there's easier things to do but this isn't 
at all that difficult. In fact, it is properly documented as well by the 
Fedora Unity project [1].

> 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!..
> 

And again, properly documented by the Fedora Unity project [1]. All the 
software you ever wanted, in- or outside the Fedora Universe, including 
directions on things to keep track of while you go and install it the 
first time.

> Does this sound familiar? No? ..  YES!!!
> 
> This is year 2007 and the problematics above describes scenarios that 
> should have been gone many years ago.. [...]

In fact it is a 'problem' that should not exist at all. 3rd party 
repositories should not need to exist for the distribution of 
proprietary or patented (eg. non-free) software if only all software was 
free. Fedora (or: Free Software) is exactly the solution to that 
problem. Side-note: Of course 3rd party repositories can have a 
different opinion on how stuff should be packaged or whether to allow 
the most bleeding edge stuff, etc... They'd not become completely 
obsolete in a free-software world.

> 
> 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).

Obviously, you're not the first to mention this. Apparently less obvious 
is that these guys do cooperate, and put aside some of their opinions 
and principles in order to do so. In addition, they put in extreme 
amounts of effort, too. Maybe even less obvious is that although there 
are reasons to not merge all 3rd party repositories together, they still 
make the effort. I mean they did initiate their own repositories for a 
reason, rather then joining some existent effort, right? Despite the 
history of things though (you could have known all this), they still 
make the effort of merging repositories. Not for their sake, but for yours.

> 
> 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.

The problem is not that there is more then one add-on repository for 
Fedora. The problem is not that some of those repositories or packages 
within those repositories conflict with one another. The problem isn't 
that there is non-free software either.

You calling this a mess however, that is what I call a serious problem. 
How dare you say anyone is doing users and the community any harm? I 
certainly hope you didn't really mean it that way. If anything, Fedora 
is about improving user experience with the Linux operating system, as 
long as it is Free and Open Source Software. If anything, we move 
forward on improving that very branch, too. There's lots of people 
putting in lots of effort working on that set of principles, for their 
own sake as well as yours. And because it's cool and challenging.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip

[1] - Fedora Unity project:
http://fedoraunity.org




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