yum repo compatibility

[Christopher Hicks]

A few tidbits:

- thanks to Dag and others for having the discussion all over again on the 
user-oriented fedora-list.  Burying this stuff on the development side 
doesn't enlighten user very well.

- I had really hoped that Fedora would inspire a more debian-like 
community around Red Hat.  It seems like there's a lot of interest in 
this, but also a lot of historical grief and bad blood.  That's 
encouraging and saddening simultaneoushly.  There's a lot of good work 
being done out there.  I hope that folks will put the time into "making it 
official" so that the various cool repositories aren't "lucky" finds. 
RH/Fedora/yum/rpm have so much going for them.  I think some more 
cooperation will make it a permanent fixture of IT.

- CPAN and Debian provide very good examples of doing what we're trying to 
do here and doing it very well.  Someone from one of those camps might be 
willing to moderate discussions between the competing parties so that 
something good could be achieved.  I'm sure those folks would be willing 
to answer questions about how they got past various problems.

-- 
</chris>

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. -Bertrand
Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)