[users] Dropping the repotag

[users-owner at lists.rpmforge.net]

I find the repotag extremely useful, and I am sorry to see it go.  
FWIW, I intend to keep the repotag on my own repo, which AFAIK is  
used by pretty much no-one except our own site ;-). My repo extends  
CentOS & RPMforge and is 100% compatible (I hope).

WRT the "let the thousand repos blossom" discussion, I think that  
point is moot. I find only ONE repo that does not step on other's  
toes and that is RPMforge. If you remember my fruitless debate with  
Rex Dieter a while back when he started providing fftw in version 3  
(tsk tsk tsk) you will see at what point I lost faith in the multi- 
repo idea.

I have since rebuilt Rex's SRPMs in RPMforge-compatible dependency  
mode(*) without problems -- the packages are excellent (thanks Rex)  
-- and the kde repotag was quite useful in identifying and wiping the  
kde-redhat packages from our systems ;-)

My hope is that RPMforge will develop to be for RHEL what universe  
and multiverse is to Ubuntu: namely everything that the mother  
distribution is not. To that end it is necessary to have more than 3  
packagers, and to involve an efficient infrastructure that allows for  
automatic building (and testing) of packages.

With only 3 active packagers in RPMforge and no published packaging  
policy, RPMforge will eventually be overtaken by "third class  
citizens" who rename and renumber and epoch packages in a complete  
erratic, incompatible and incompetent manner. If that happens, I  
foresee that I will be spending my valuable time on stupid dependency  
problems and recompiling packages to solve them, and that will mean  
hello Debian for me.


Cheers,
Morten

*) i.e. depends on RPMforge packages if they exist