Re: gnokii-0.6.13-1.fc5.rf incompatible with Fedora Extras

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Rex Dieter wrote:

> Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > At least you could have said it was unfortunate that inconsistencies are
> > introduced within Fedora Extras that break things outside Fedora Extras.
> 
> That's mostly a given, but I'd argue that the inconsistencies you cite can
> (and do) come from any/all sides.  Collaboration discussions need to stay
> out of the blame game, and focus on how better to work together.
> 
> "outside of Fedora Extras" meaning what exactly?  rhel?  3rd party repos?

Rex, it would have been nice if the default policy of Fedora Extras 3 
years ago would have been: "look for existing packages in the Red 
Hat/Fedora realm (3rd party repos) and work to include something 
compatible".

For various reasons (politics, workload, competition, grow as big as fast 
as possible to name a few) this common sense idea and the 
implementation has alienated a lot of users and myself.


> If you meant rhel, then I can vouge that FESCo is working hard to expand
> Extras into that space.  There's a huge demand for that.

I can understand :) But then again, I don't see how Fedora is prepared for 
this. They never cared about it. 3 years ago I voiced my opinion many 
times. Fedora always said they were ONLY interested in Fedora so they 
didn't care about RHEL/CentOS. Now the effort for Fedora is much harder 
and complicated to support RHEL.

To me it is an acknowledgement from the Fedora project that Fedora is 
bleeding edge and not to be used in production or for non-technical 
people. Fedora's updates have a higher risk, Fedora is high-maintenance 
and a lot of people's desillusions have popped and they moved to CentOS.

 
> > A good policy would have
> > been to check what was available before starting from afresh and
> > communicate with existing repositories.
> 
> FYI, the "check what was available" bit *is* part of Fedora's Packaging
> Guidelines and is (should be!) done as part of the package review process.

That's new to me and failed to work in many cases. Maybe it should have 
listed a few prominent repositories ? :) But I have seen many packages 
being introduced in Fedora that do not comply with the guidelines either 
while mine did, eg. the MixedCase package names.

Why do I not report them ? Because I don't have the time, I don't know 
where, the ship has sailed and I don't consider myself part of the Fedora 
community. And Fedora never cared about my cause, why should I care about 
Fedoras ?


> Any other concrete suggestions?

No, most of that is overdue, I gave up years ago :)


> > Fedora Extras attitude problems still remain.
> 
> Certainly everyone needs to put the attitude aside to facilitate positive
> change.

Sure.

For what it's worth (and I hope it's worth something) I do have to thank 
you for a lot of work you've done personally to the Open Source community. 

Everyone that helps the Open Source cause is a friend, regardless of the 
differences in opinion. There's more that unites us than that drives us 
apart.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  [email protected],  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]