What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ... packages due to licensing issues"

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 11:19:39AM -0700, Randall J. Parr wrote:
> Given the recent retoric on the Fedora and Red Hat newsgroups
> I had high hopes the Fedora repository and approach would expand and gain
> more wide spread use thus making it even easier to pull-together a fully 
> functional workstation/desktop.
> 
> Now it appears the one good, effective effort has been coopted and devalued.

Not really.

There are already other repositories out there, such as Dag Wieers's,

	http://dag.wieers.com/packages/

who, *surprise*, is also a contributor to the original Fedora Linux Project.

Also: ATrpms: http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/

Having perused the new Fedora web site a bit, the one thought that leaps
to mind is that CVS will be the weakest link in scaling this project out.
The sooner Fedora can move to a distributed revision control mechanism
(such as arch) that integrates well with the build environment, the better
it will be for contributors who, for whatever reason, legal or otherwise,
cannot push their changes/packages upstream.  Projects sometimes need
to diverge rather far from the trunk before they are stable or useful,
and constant merging with CVS is a miserable time-consuming task.  E.g.,
SElinux, or full support for 2.6, both of which involve changes to the
kernel, initscripts, mkinitrd, util-linux, ...

There are of course reasons for retaining centralized control --
ask your friendly BSD'er.  But I'd much rather see something akin to the
current kernel development model for the entire Fedora distribution.

	Bill Rugolsky