Re: Octave for CentOS5

Hi Phil,

Philip Ray Schaffner wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 00:37 +0000, Karanbir Singh
wrote:
>> Hi Phil,
>>
>> we are working on a process for contributing rpms
into centos-extras.. 
>> I'd expect that process will pickup steam once c-5
is out of the door.
> 
> So have you core guys thought about how EPEL will
impact extra, 
> centosplus, kbs-extras, ...?  Seems like joining that
effort might be 
> more productive than separate thrusts to port/rebuild
packages that are 
> in Fedora Extras.

EPEL is interesting and it has a lot of potential, but the
fact that 
they only care about, build for and expect usage on RHEL
tends to sort 
of exclude a lot of external participation in the project.
So much so 
that a redhat person said that the only aim they have in
pushing epel 
is to they can go tell their customers about it!!

Added to that the overhead of needing to sign papers with
Redhat and the 
need to become a Fedora contributor first, only further
increases the 
bar to entry and creates really un-necessary issues for
people who are 
unable to, for various reasons to sign such papers etc. And
given the 
fact that Fedora packaging dynamics are drastically
different from 
packaging on *EL, whether the general Fedora guidelines and

infrastructure is even usable long term for EPEL is itself
doubt.

So in effect what epel creates today is yet-another-repo.
Perhaps the 
best repo of them all. But it is effectively, just another
repo.

EPEL does not really solve the  big problem, about being
able to present 
a single repository for the EL user base ( whatever variant
they might 
be on ). Not sure how many people are following the
rpmfusion 
discussions that some of the fedora-unity guys have going on
at the 
moment, but i think thats a brilliant effort, if we could
stretch it to 
*EL, that would be a result.

The real, short to medium term, wins for CentOS and other
*EL distros - 
is to have an infrastructure that allows packagers to
maintain their 
spec's in whatever system / buildprocess / version control
system they 
prefer and yet be able to expose the resulting binaries in a
single 
repository ( or, well, a single place for the repos - split
by stability 
and disto friendliness rather than role ). The mechanics and
policy for 
such an effort to happen are things that need working out,
but based on 
the conversations that took place at Fosdem this year - its
achievable.

Finally, I just want to point out that this represents my
personal 
viewpoint, and is not a 'CentOS perspective' on the issue.
How and what 
CentOS as a project can do, should do and is able to do with
EPEL is 
something that still needs to be worked out. But for now,
epel will be 
just another repo, at par with anything else / everything
else out there.

Which is why I think that the special interest groups that
care about 
specific vertical markets and deployment roles should be
organised. And 
one thing that I know definitely needs to happen, asap, is
to expand on 
the 'involved contributors' numbers. CentOS today has a few
million 
users out there, but the number of people actively involved
is still 
just a few dozen at best. That needs to change, and ideas on
how such a 
change might come about and what we are doing wrong that
needs to be 
fixed, are *very* welcome.

- KB

PS: I am not being negative about epel, just sharing what
the picture 
looks like from this side of the fence. I know almost all
the guys who 
are branching for epel at this time, and I think they are
all great guys 
with excellent packaging skills.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ :
2522219icq
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Re: Octave for CentOS5

Thread: Re: Octave for CentOS5