[users] The demise of the repotag

[Dag Wieers]

Hi,

As I expected and briefed before, Fedora and EPEL will not adopt a 
repotag. With that they refuse to accept or consider the existence of a 
diversity of repositories, or at least promote themselves to be the one 
and only upstream provider of packages.

By this they ignore the fact that people have different needs even though 
they only fill in one need (a set of packages that is mostly fixed in 
time). RPMforge deliberately chooses to provide recent packages where that 
makes sense. In a healthy environment people choose what they need.

Now as stated multiple times on the EPEL mailinglist, Fedora/EPEL 
considers itself as the only big repository for EL despite the fact that 
they are the newcomer.

I am convinced that a repotag is an important tool for users to identify 
packages and is necessary to differentiate packages, but the blatant 
refusal of Fedora/EPEL in this regard is a slap in the face of 
existing repositories.

For that reason I have decided to not longer use a repotag in my packages. 
The reason why EPEL can so easily decide as a newcomer to not use a 
repotag is exactly because everybody else is using repotags. And I oppose 
to the fact that they can take advantage of something they do not take 
part of.

You can follow the discussions on the epel-devel-list and read my final 
statement on the matter at:

	https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-April/msg00099.html

For much the same reasons Axel Thimm of Atrpms has informed me he is 
considering dropping the repotag as well.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]