What's the recommended relationship to previous repositories? [LWN.net]

What's the recommended relationship to previous repositories?

Posted Feb 3, 2005 1:07 UTC (Thu) by adastra (guest, #126)
Parent article: Fedora Extras available for download

I've been drawing some stuff in from freshprms, dag, and atrpms. It looks in a few places like Fedora Extras is a merge of (some of?) fedora.us and freshrpms. OTOH, freshrpms, dag, atrpms and others were supposed to form RpmForge according to Dag's webpage: "However, together with FreshRPMS, PlanetCCRMA and Dries, we're working towards a merge under the RPMforge umbrella." I see several of the independent packagers talking on the fedora-devel and fedora-extras webpages. The independent repository pages and Fedora project pages and wikis all seem to be out of date.
My unanswered questions:
(1) Who is contributing packages to Fedora Extras?
(2) If any formerly independent repository is contributing, should I replace its entry in my apt sources.list with Fedora Extras?
(3) Which repositories is Fedora Extras compatible with?
(4) Is RpmForge alive? Their webpage is blank.
(5) Is Fedora finally ready for the community, and if so, will the community still work with them?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

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What's the recommended relationship to previous repositories?

Posted Feb 3, 2005 5:22 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

1. Contributors to Fedora Extras include:
Michael Scwendt
Matthias Saou
Thomas Vander Stichele
Warren Togami
Thorsten Leemhuis
Ville Skyttä
Enrico Scholz
Jeremy Katz
Seth Vidal
Phillip Compton

2. You can do whatever you want in your repository lists. Take a look at what is there and see where to go from there.

3. We're not targeting compatibility with anyone/anything other than fedora core. That said, we're also not trying to be incompatible with anyone.

4. Dunno what rpmforge is doing but last I checked there were packages out there claiming to be from rpmforge so I'd suspect they are.

5. I'm 'from the community' and I'm currently doing all the builds for fedora extras. In addition, the fedora extras rss feeds are generated by me and the wiki with all the status info is run by the community.
Fedora has had a hard time making it easy for community involvement due to a lot of misc foot dragging. But if you really wanted to be involved, you could be. You just had to stop asking Red Hat 'what can I do?' and go ahead and do things and let THEM follow you. That's how the community should work anyway. Don't wait for them to lead. Go there and let them meet you if what you do is good. That being said, it doesn't hurt to prod them in the direction you want to go, either ;)

-sv