Alan, >When you have too many repositories especially of critical stuff you >end up in a gigantic dependancy disaster. That is one reason core has >to be well controlled and why extras is defined in terms of building on >core and extras only. This at least pulls the core libraries into a single >place and form. There aren't dozens of repositories. There are dozens (one per maintainer) tag-lists feeding off the same repository. Core is just another taglist. And core's taglist has one maintainer so we know who to shoot. There may be a few repositories (e.g. some tag lists draw from a binary proprietary location) but in general all a maintainer is trying to do is satisfy his target audience (the computational mathematicians). >Equally the original definition recognized people would want to do things >that broke compatibility with core components and that users should be able >to tell this would happen - Fedora Alternatives being the tag name we used >for such packages. That might be as mundane as a gnome-libs variant with >new features or as significant as using the FreeBSD kernel or Hurd as the >core kernel. Lets suppose there are two incompatible libraries, like libc6 and glibc. A maintainer will have to choose one for his taglist. He'll also have to ensure that all of the packages he chooses work with his lib choice. A similar problem occurs with the choice of desktop, KDE vs GNOME. If we continue to use Core+Extras as concepts we'll have endless looping discussions about why tuxracer must be in Core and even the kernel. It is clear that the lagged-worldwide-free for all discussion is never going to converge to consensus. At least the maintainer concept allows fedora to support diverse communities that don't agree on "fundamentals". >There does seem to be an O(N^lots) co-ordination requirement between main >repositories and we must be careful of that. Maybe Conary will, once half >of it has stopped being armwaved, solve that. Repositories don't have to coordinate. Getting the distribution correct and working is the maintainer's job. If the Computational Mathematics taglist creates a bad build we know who to blame and who has to fix it. If Core+Extras is broken there is nothing but finger pointing. Are you the Alan Cox of -ac fame? If so, surely you know about maintainers in the kernel. Tim Daly daly@xxxxxxxx
