A much needed feature

[salmankhilji]

I recently tried Gentoo---got rid of it within a few days and switched to Vida Linux. I intend to come back to Fedora as soon as FC3 is released.

However, here is one feature that I like with Gentoo that can't be beat. There is only ONE repsitory where you download packages from. With Fedora, there is ATRpms, FreshRPMs, Fedora.us, Nyquist, DAG, and the repository that I got flash-player from that I cannot remember and probably a few dozen other. Furthermore, the user is overwhelmed with trying to configure the machine for a set of repositories that do not conflict with each other.

I now for licensing reasons, they cannot put mp3 repositories in the default configuration, but what they should be able to do is at least ON THE DAY a new Fedora Core is released, provide a yum.conf on some site like fedorafaq or something where I should be able to find SINGLE "official" yum.conf file that provide:

1) Acrobat Reader
2) Flash player
3) MS Core fonts
4) java
5) mp3
6) Xine and mplayer
7) NVidia drivers.

It seems like currently you have to wait for a while and fool around with yum.conf yourself for a couple of weeks after which someone figures out "the perfect yum.conf" file.

Gentoo portage has all of the above stuff and this is exacty where it beats Fedore hands down. But I want to come back to Fedora as I neither have the time nor the knowledge to keep tinkering with my system---An OS should allow you to get work done---not tinker with it and wait for emerge to finish. It seems like Gentoo developers have confused the term "work" and "tinker"---I found myself sitting in front of my computer for hours and accomplishing nothing but doing some emering and other crap.

From Mandrake 8.0, I can remember that mp3 wasn't an issue, but I do not want to use Mandrake as fonts simply look crap on Mandrake. The same is true with Gentoo---I had to tinker with the font settings to make them look good, but still not as good as FC2!

Salman

[imdeemvp]

i will suggest you to read the www.fedorafaq.org EVERYTHING IS THERE!!

[superbnerd]

I know what you mean. They should give an actually usefull yum.conf, but they might get sued for linking to packages that have incompatible licencses, just like those site that got shutdown for linking to the DeCSS (http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/main.html). But than again, the search engine weren't found guilty for linking to it either. Plus, the user theoretically accepts each packages lincence by installing the program, so the lame would be on he users not redhat.

[foolish]

No, Red Hat can't distribute packages which aren't freely redistrutable. It's that simple.

As for the one repository to rule them all idea, I love it. But it's not possible. Let's settle for the second best solution. This is how it works:

1. We have the Core. The Core consists of the basic packages you need to get a working setup. Core is controlled by Core developers and released now and then (like now).

2. We have Fedora-Extras. (which is now called fedora.us). All packages that didn't make it into Core are placed here. This is a multi packager project. Packages go through the same testing as in Core. Extras is controlled by Red Hat, and as such, it can't package any fishy packages.

3. The Freeworld repository (which is now known as livna.org). It mirrors the setup of Fedora-Extras, but only package the packages which can't make it into -Extras or Core. These are media players, acrobat reader, anything developeed using MONO and so on.

This setup, with the 3 repositories to rule them all, is in my oppinion the ideal, and this is one reason why I'm such a supporter of fedora.us+livna.org instead of the freshrpms, atrpms and so on.

[superbnerd]

That would be ideal if livna could support all the packages dag has.

Why doesn't redhat at least configure the yum.conf for fedora.us and livna. They wouldn't make them distrobutors would it?

[foolish]

It would. I'm no expert on law, and certanly I know close to nothing of american law, but I'm sure the Red Hat Legal department do know, and that the measures they've taken are for the better.

And remember people, packages aren't made by themselves. The easiest way to have all the packages in Dag Wieers repository in Livna would be for Dag Wieers to join with livna. Same goes for Freshrpms and the rest of them.

However, there has been some bad blood between the two alliances, the freshrpms people feel their views haven't been taken into consideration when fedora.us was startet and now that we're moving towards fedora-extras as well. Both sides need a bit of kicking and they need to work together.

[superbnerd]

Perhaps that should be our next campaign. We should continually harras both alliances to work to gether becuase we are sick of dep hell. If we attack their mailing list and bugzilla with enough request they will be forced to cooperate by the release of fc4.

We need someone to lead this campaign...foolish, you look like a good canidate. You have influence with the developers and packages. Would you be willing to head this organized effort to coerce the alliances?

[foolish]

It is a nice idea, and it's good to let the packages know you would much more like them to join with fedora-extras and freeworld. But I don't see how any of the freshrpms alliance will give up all their rutines, their work processes and most of all, their complete control of everything in their repositories without getting something back, and I've been told as much when talking with some packagers about it.

The sad fact is, it may be too late. If fedora-extras was pused right after the Fedora.us+Red Hat merge, the community packagers allowed to take part in the planning and such, we would already have this. But because of legal issues, and Red Hats complete lack of community involvement, we're stuck where we are today.

However, I will have yet another talk with some of the packagers I'm more friendly with than the others, and try to understand once more what's the reasoning behind the diverted efforts.

[Shadow Skill]

While the single repository idea is a very excellent one that I totally agree with it and recognize that will reduce dephell; I feel that we need to go one step further and make a move to eliminate the need for a CLI to be used. The Xfce installer and to a lesser extent so far as I can tell the firefox installer are prototypes for what needs to be done, on major part at least. What the Xfce installer lacks right now is the ability to specify compile options; once we have that and an rpm system that doesn't die if you mix source and rpm, we will have finally ended dephell and at the same time opened the door way for even more exposure for linux in the land of the desktop.

[Jman]

One repository would be nice, but it would not be Feodra Core. The whole concept was to have some core packages and a sort of official extras repository.

People are free to package Fedora packages if they want so there will be more than one repository.

There is a loose confederation of Fedora package builders (http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/mega-merge.php) that are trying to avoid dependency problems.

In the end Red Hat simply will not maintain thousands of packages. That's where the extras community is supposed to come in.

[foolish]

And there is fedora.us, which will become the offical Fedora-Extras soon.

As for leaving the rpm idea, that's not the way we want to go. We don't want graphical installers for everything like windows has. We want one application to install everything, even commercial applications. It's much better for usability to have one application, search for what you want and then click install and have everything handled for you, I made some notes about my ideas in this thread: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showpost.php?p=93719&postcount=59

[salaneking]

The easy urpmi site http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ gives the option to select a site then hit a button. This button then writes a config line which the user then places in their script or command line. This is very convienant to use IMHO. Their underlying software is GPL. it should be easily adaptable. ( Not that i can or have time to learn)

[Shadow Skill]

Why do you people forget that source tarballs don't exist...face it RPM is not the only thing that exists there can be no desktop Linux of any real relevance without moving source tarball compiling away from the CLI as the ONLY option to deal with source packages. Hell the XFCE4 RPM'S dd not work for me (stable, and the CVS one's mind you.) I even compiled the CVS from source code and no dice, I wasted close to three hours of my life compiling the program...I used the nice installer script which was graphical mind you and XFCE4 works perfectly for me.