Re: Silly question to Mr. Wieers and Mr. Parsley

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Juan Carlos Castro y Castro wrote:

> If Dag made a symlink named <web-root>/tao/1.0 pointing to
> <web-root>/redhat/el3 on his web server,
> would we be able to have this in yum.conf? (And then it could be eternal, as
> long as future versions
> of RHEL had similar links named after the matching Tao version?)
> 
> [dag]
> name=Dag Wieers' RHEL compatible RPMs
> baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/tao/$releasever/en/$basearch/dag

The big problem when doing things like this (and believe me I've been 
tempted to do it) is that you make a more complex situation where people 
have multiple access points for the same information.

This leads to several situation that I consider unwanted, like people 
cannot mirror using http/lftp or something else that may not export 
symlinks and the fact that if you have stats for popularity, it is more 
difficult to see the aggregated numbers. (Redirects however would have 
been fine) It also makes the root directory more complex while leading to 
the same content and may make TaoLinux and CentOS something different from 
RHEL3, while it is their goal to be compatible.

Also then I need to make seperate apt packages for CentOS/TaoLinux with 
adapted config files. (to promote this new situation).

So I think it would be much better if TaoLinux and CentOS would use the 
same version as RHEL (this would be better for users anyway, now it is 
plain confusing whether CentOS 3.3 is something that evolved from RHEL3 or 
not).

I don't want to make one thing more simple by making another thing more 
complex.

Thanks for the feedback,

PS I would welcome other solutions like a system that redirects for 
taolinux or centos to the correct mirror/directory. Sadly I don't have 
control over http://apt.sw.be/ to do it myself. But Yum can handle http 
redirects.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  [email protected],  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]