That's _the_ opportunity for such members to step forward and maintain the
packages in Fedora Extras, provided that the previous maintainer at Red
Hat hasn't planned to do that.
Yeah, but if there is some software package I like, I'm more inclined to install it from source rather than to screw around with rpms... Be that finding a prebuilt one that's six months out of date or going through the extra bother to generate rpms.
I've built rpms before, but the question I'd have then is what would be expected of me if I ~were~ to maintain a package myself. It's easy for me to test on AMD64 and (possibly) x86, but I'm not going to be able to support a package for the Itanic.
No one has attempted to bzip2 packages that might save space.
I remember a long discussion about time/space tradeoffs. bzip2 uncompression is a lot slower than gzip.
On newer computers (>1 GhZ) I think that the installation time is more determined by the speed of the I/O system than the speed of the CPU. bzip might actually help.
