Name is but sound and smoke (was: Freshrpms.net concerns.)

[Axel Thimm]

Hello Alexandre,

On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 05:53:21PM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Nov  9, 2003, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> > Fedora Extras is yet to emerge (possibly at FC2 test releases).
> 
> Err...  You mean yet to emerge as in from Fedora.us?  Look again.  The
> repository is already there.  So is livna extras.  And so is lisas
> extras.

I don't think you will make friends with your employer's lawyers. ;)

Fedora Extras/Alternatives have very special requirements concerning
their contents, at least last time I browsed through the
terminology. They need to use only open source (so me carrying
nvidia/ltmodem am already out of the game) and need to comply to
certain legal US aspects making freshrpms,atrpms,dag,livna,<your repo
here> non Fedoraizable, neither as Extras nor as Alternatives.

AFAIK you may not even link, mention and so on these repos, if you are
living in the US (sometimes I feel like a criminal ...). :(

When I wrote above about Fedora Extras yet to materialize I was
refering to the merger that would convert fedora.us to Fedora Extras
proper. AFAICT fedora.us members themselves speak of Fedora Extras in
the future tense ;)

> Meanwhile, ATrpms and Freshrpms are building their Fedora repositories
> without splitting packages into Extras and Alternatives, which I think
> is going to make them unusable for a large number of users.  Please
> reconsider.

Why splitting off Alternatives? What exactly are Alternatives? From
the name I would consider as alternatives different browsers (like
Dag's browser collection), different MTAs postfix/sendmail, different
IMAP servers etc.

What people have been discussing in this thread was an upgrade of
gimp. Should that be defined as alternatives? I have an upgrade of
make to 3.80. Is that an alternative to the shipped make?

From my POV I don't see what it buys me to call 1/3 of my repo Extras,
another Alternatives and another 3rd party. The terminology is
confusing and after all they are all only names. Patents/strict OSS
aside would a FreshRPMs alternatives or an ATrpms extras make users
more comfortable? ("Hey, where is ATrpms core? What about FreshRPMs
Legacy?" ;)

It is quite a mess ... :)

> > It isn't clear to me whether this will be one repo or a general
> > description of Red Hat hosted repos (like Fedora Extras High
> > Performance, Fedora Extras Engineering etc.).
> 
> Meanwhile, repositories like yours could be filling the gap.  However,
> since you don't follow the Extras/Alternatives separation, they can't
> fit easily into the Fedora nomenclature other than simply as Third
> Party repositories.

They will never fall into anything else due to patent problems.

> I'd like to see more repositories offering Extras, and Alternatives
> only in smaller repositories, such that I don't end up being nagged
> by RHN to update Mozilla to 1.5 just because I want to use Dag's
> ccache, distcc and mozilla-j2re.

That's the general problem of granularity. But there is no good
solution to that. You want ccache, distcc and mozilla-j2re in a
separate dag-repo. Somebody else wants all browsers with
mozilla-j2re. Yet somebody else wants all java applications and
mozilla-j2re.

What should Dag do in this case? Create a miriad of virtual repos for
any set of needs? It is not only Extras and Alternatives needed for
solving this.

apt does have a method to deal with this (pinning), which can be used
as a first step to personalize the pulled packages. Unfortunatley it
is only available in apt, and is quite fragile (currently broken in
apt-rpm).

> Also, if I choose to use his Mozilla 1.5, I don't end up having to
> update say epiphany as well (or risking missing updates, if I tell
> the RHN applet to not update it automatically).
> 
> I can see that the same reasoning could be used for Extras as well.
> Say, if I'd like (for whatever reason) to use livna's mplayer, I
> wouldn't like freshrpms' or ATrpms' mplayer to be installed with
> up2date -u.

You are describing pinning. But it is very hard to implement proper.

> All in all, this is a limitation of up2date, that won't let me filter
> channels according to my preferences.  Something for the up2date
> wishlist, I guess.  Meanwhile, I think splitting repositories into
> a finer granularity is the best way to accomplish this.
> Unfortunately, I see this places an additional burden on the
> volunteers that run such repositories, so...  Oh, well...  Thanks for
> reading this far :-)

I think this splitting will become a nightmare. As I said I don't even
yet fully understand Alternatives (and why they are _semantically_
separated from Extras). I believe that these structures need to mature
further before people jump on using them. After all they were created
under high time pressure and maybe don't model the needs as they
should.

Perhaps the authors behind these structures should give their
interpretation/intention to the audience. ;)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at physik.fu-berlin.de
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