[my reply is somewhat off-topic because you address a general problem] On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:37:04 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote: > Also, for the fedora.us people - what should we do when wanting to > provide theora to pre-FC2 ? Theora requires a 1.1 version of ogg - does > that mean that everything we build for FC1 and older that wants to use > theora has to go in patches ? Yes, provided that the "patches" repository is continued. But I doubt it is. The "patches" repository is located at the root of the extras tree together with the "pending" repository. It's not included in the yum/apt config files as an entry which is disabled by default. Hardly any users know that it exists at all. Only few packages have been released into it to fix a few bugs in Red Hat Linux (and later Fedora Core 1) for which no official errata had been published, e.g. RPM. The FC2 "patches" repository is empty. The "patches" repository is trouble-some. Any extra packages which depend on it, must go into "patches", too, in order to not break any dependencies in the normal extras repositories. But stuff in "patches" can depend on extra packages. This is a mess unless the "patches" repository were advertized more. Then again, bugs in Fedora Core should be fixed with official updates, not with unofficial ones. Raises the question what to do when software in Fedora Core needs a version upgrade so extra packages could be built against it? How about opening up a "Fedora Alternatives" repository at fedora.us instead? If "Alternatives" are permitted to replace or conflict with packages in Fedora Core, is it also possible to update/upgrade packages in Fedora Core? http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/terminology.html That would give us more flexibility in preparing and testing software which could not be built against Fedora Core because it requires newer versions of some packages. As another example, with k3b, currently we're pretty much stuck. k3b, which had been an add-on for a long time, was included in FC2 with version 0.11.9. The same version is available as an extra package for Red Hat Linux and FC1. We cannot update the extra packages to a newer version, because that would violate the upgrade path to FC2. But we don't have a way to release unofficial updates or "Fedora Extras Test Updates" either. Hence we have prepared k3b 0.11.10 for FC1 and RHL9, keeping it in "pending", waiting for the FC2 version in "Updates Testing" to be released some day. Meanwhile k3b 0.11.11 has been released, and the game continues. As long as FC2 is stuck at k3b 0.11.9, we cannot upgrade the extra packages. So, in addition to the stable/testing/unstable, we could need a public repository similar to "Updates Testing" in which to release stuff which may or may not become an official update. We could also redefine the purpose of the current "testing" repository for that.
