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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