Jonas Karlsson wrote:
Hello all,
This is my first post to this list, hopefully some of you can agree to
what I'm writing.
[...] But one thing that has always nagged at me is why do the Linux
community often have a hard time at working toghether. [...]
Erhm, last time I saw people having a hard time working together, within
moments they had signed a deal between the two of them resulting in one
of them waving with coupons.
I (after all my years) still do have big troubble selecting a 3rd party
repository every time a new version of fedora comes around.
How is that possible? I know there's easier things to do but this isn't
at all that difficult. In fact, it is properly documented as well by the
Fedora Unity project [1].
Do I use
this or that with this version of fedora, which works best.. and help me
upstairs.. you have to choose because they are not campatible and might
break your system and kill all of your dependencies, shit!..
And again, properly documented by the Fedora Unity project [1]. All the
software you ever wanted, in- or outside the Fedora Universe, including
directions on things to keep track of while you go and install it the
first time.
Does this sound familiar? No? .. YES!!!
This is year 2007 and the problematics above describes scenarios that
should have been gone many years ago.. [...]
In fact it is a 'problem' that should not exist at all. 3rd party
repositories should not need to exist for the distribution of
proprietary or patented (eg. non-free) software if only all software was
free. Fedora (or: Free Software) is exactly the solution to that
problem. Side-note: Of course 3rd party repositories can have a
different opinion on how stuff should be packaged or whether to allow
the most bleeding edge stuff, etc... They'd not become completely
obsolete in a free-software world.
Ok back on track (3rd party repositories) It's way over time to have
guys like livna, freshrpms, rpmforge and atrpms etc start a collective,
collaborative and functional repository (for the greater good).
Obviously, you're not the first to mention this. Apparently less obvious
is that these guys do cooperate, and put aside some of their opinions
and principles in order to do so. In addition, they put in extreme
amounts of effort, too. Maybe even less obvious is that although there
are reasons to not merge all 3rd party repositories together, they still
make the effort. I mean they did initiate their own repositories for a
reason, rather then joining some existent effort, right? Despite the
history of things though (you could have known all this), they still
make the effort of merging repositories. Not for their sake, but for yours.
Now that we finally are past Core and Extras and it is merged into one.
The next step shold be to clean up the above described mess that is
doing harm to the Fedora users and the general community by creating
confusion and eventually breaks your installation.
The problem is not that there is more then one add-on repository for
Fedora. The problem is not that some of those repositories or packages
within those repositories conflict with one another. The problem isn't
that there is non-free software either.
You calling this a mess however, that is what I call a serious problem.
How dare you say anyone is doing users and the community any harm? I
certainly hope you didn't really mean it that way. If anything, Fedora
is about improving user experience with the Linux operating system, as
long as it is Free and Open Source Software. If anything, we move
forward on improving that very branch, too. There's lots of people
putting in lots of effort working on that set of principles, for their
own sake as well as yours. And because it's cool and challenging.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip
[1] - Fedora Unity project:
http://fedoraunity.org
--
Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
