RPM Fusion [LWN.net]

By Rebecca Sobol
September 12, 2007

The RPM Fusion Project was announced this week. Three repositories, Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna will merge to provide Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux users with add-on software packages.

This will actually be separated into two repositories. One for free and the other for non-free software (as defined by the Fedora Packaging Guidelines). The free repository, presumably hosted outside the U.S., will contain software that cannot be packaged by Fedora because of U.S. restrictions (patents), but is considered free in other parts of the world. The current thought is that it should be possible for Fedora to link to this repository from the main Fedora site, although I don't think that the Red Hat legal department has had its final say.

The non-free repository will contain software that has "no commercial use" restrictions or otherwise doesn't conform to anyone's definition of free such as the the graphics drivers from Nvidia. It seems unlikely that a link will be made from a main Fedora site to this non-free area, but a link could be made from the free part of RPM Fusion.

RPM Fusion repositories will follow Fedora's packaging guidelines (except for legal), Fedora's review process for new submissions, Fedora's VCS structure, etc. to ensure compatibility with Fedora systems.

RPM Fusion will have competition from other projects. ATrpms.net has declined to join RPM Fusion. Axel Thimm wrote:

Over the last couple of months I had been involved in two projects, epel and rpmfusion, that happened to also involve Thorsten. It turns out that we make a very bad team to make an understatement. I don't like what epel is turning to, and I also don't like what rpmfusion has stalled into.

My personal dream of getting all third party repos including not only the ones that are still on this list, but also Dag, Dries, KB, ccrma and centos+/sl+ slowly crumbled into ashes. Instead of a grand merger we would simply achieve reducing N to M < N.

RPMforge.net is yet another somewhat similar project. According to its manifest: "The RPMforge.net project is an independent community-driven project to provide the infrastructure and tools to allow users, developers and packagers to meet and work together to provide and improve RPM packages." This project provides an extensive list of RPM packages for Red Hat, Fedora and Aurora systems.

For many users the RPM Fusion project will provide all the extra packages they need. Other users will appreciate that they have a choice, other places where their needs may be met. Some competition is rarely a bad thing.

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Fedora won't link to it

Posted Sep 13, 2007 3:54 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I read the discussion, and clearly the Red Hat people are worried about contributory infringement charges, so we'll have to continue doing what we do now (manually adding the repository, as I do with livna).

Not that it's a big deal; it's a one-liner to install the RPM that adds the repository.

I suppose that somebody in Norway, say, could do a re-spin (the EU is getting more risky for things like libdvdcss). But I don't think any Red Hat people could be involved.

RPM Fusion - I hope they've got the magic pixie dust.

Posted Sep 13, 2007 6:01 UTC (Thu) by jkowing (subscriber, #5172) [Link]

I greatly appreciate the work of all the Fedora folks and the rpm packagers - but - alas - from the first day of Fedora Core 1 I've always been a bit dismayed at the number of respositories I always had to end up 1.) Discovering that they exist, 2.) Determining if they have the package I need 3.) Contemplating whether the repository is or is not compatible with the others I am using, 4.) Trying to play games with yum repository prioritization when inevitably I would need a package from a conflicting repository. In so doing, it was as if it were the cold war all over again - there appeared to be two major world power repos with their allies and then a sprinkling of little tiny 3rd world repositories - some neutral and some leaning one way or the other. I observed innocent naive civilians wondering why their Fedora machines were acting so sickly after mixing packages from opposing forces.

I have to say, I was always rather envious of my Debian (and then Ubuntu) friends - they seemed to live in a utopian world of a few well-categorized repositories with meaningful names that were all compatible and well stocked with almost every conceivable package. They must have magic pixie dust that lets them play so well together. They also seem to manage to maintain a united dpkg/apt development effort. That must require magic pixie dust also ;).

RPM Fusion - I hope they've got the magic pixie dust.

Posted Sep 13, 2007 9:37 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

On the other hand, AMD clearly stated (at XDS IIRC) when announcing its new FLOSS driver efforts all the workarounds that make it easy to install non-free packages are a huge disincentive to work through FLOSS community channels.

So your pain has not been for nothing, and contrarily to your debian friends you've helped move things in the right direction.

RPM Fusion - I hope they've got the magic pixie dust.

Posted Sep 13, 2007 13:41 UTC (Thu) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Even on Debian, you need to add a third-party repository to get DVD support anyway (though mp3 playback is in Debian's nonfree).

FWIW, from the days of RHL, continuing to the early days of Fedora, adding FreshRPMS has always been enough to get MP3 and DVD playback support. Later on the Livna project was started, but their packages pretty much overlap with FreshRPMS (just that it's more of a team effort), so you need not change anything.

Dries, focusing on emulation and games, has no overlap with Livna, though it does overlap with FreshRPMS.

I guess the merge is predictable -- the projects merging are the ones whose packages have tended to be non-intrusive when added to the base Fedora install (ATrpms would replace a lot of Fedora-shipped packages, and yes, discussions between Axel and Thorsten do get really heated)

mp3 playback software is in main

Posted Sep 14, 2007 14:17 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Why do people keep making this mistake? The software to play back mp3s is in Debian's main section!