Compatibility with Fedora EPEL and other 3d party repositories

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi!

Sorry for the late reply.

On 20.06.2008 00:49, Nikolay Ulyanitsky wrote:

> 1. Is RPM Fusion fully compatible with Fedora EPEL?

RPM Fusion is not started yet (but will hopefully soon). A add-on repo 
for Fedora is the first and main target; the RPM Fusion add-on repo for 
RHEL+EPEL is just a idea that some of the RPM Fusion developers (mainly 
I afaik) want to realize once RPM Fusion for Fedora is running properly.

> a) Can RPM Fusion packages conflicts with EPEL packages?

No, normally not. There might be only a few rare cases where conflicts 
might show up and are unavoidable (I can't think of any, but one never 
knows); that's the same in Fedora, where IIRC a handful of packages 
conflict explicitly ("Conflics: foo" in the spec file) or implicitly 
(conflicts on the file level) with other Fedora packages.

> b) Can RPM Fusion packages replace (have newer EVR) EPEL packages?

No, not in the main repos RPM Fusion will provide.

*Maybe* we in the long run RPM Fusion might start some additional repos 
with dedicated things -- like a "KDE4 for RHEL5" or "Kernel 2.6.26 for 
RHEL5" repo. Those will be in a special place for a subset of our users 
that are willing to accept replacements to get specific things realized 
-- but thats just a option we like to keep open for the long term and 
nothing that is planed for now.

> c) If EPEL add existing in RPM Fusion package in his repository, after
> this will RPM Fusion remove or rename this package from his repository?

Packages that are possible to be shipped in Fedora/EPEL will normally 
not get accepted in RPM Fusion. In those rare cases where a existing 
package due to upstream or other changes suddenly is permitted to get 
shipped in Fedora/EPEL RPM Fusion will stop updating it as long as the 
update path for users is taken care of by Fedora/EPEL.

> 2. Is RPM Fusion fully compatible with other 3d party repositories?

That's a hard question and there are many ways to answer it; and he 
answers to this sort of questions quickly leads to misunderstandings and 
flamewars.

So let me say just this: the main repos from RPM Fusion will be add-on 
repos for Fedora or RHEL/CentOS+EPEL. The goal is not to disturb those 
base sets we build and rely on. That's what a lot of people would define 
as compatibility (as EPEL is a 3rd party repo as well).

As soon as more 3rd party repos get into the mix a lot of problems often 
show up for users as the ecosystem (rpm/yum) is not designed to properly 
handle this. A lot (but not all!) of those problems can be fixed without 
downsides for existing users; if that's the case then we/the package 
maintainer in question IMHO should fix the problem.

Cu
knurd