On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 15:50 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
ATrpms was one of the only repos that I always advised against installing for usability reasons. Because of the large amount of package replacements in AT, updating with ATrpms in yum.repos.d often causes very invasive changes, and when things go wrong finding the issue becomes a pain.
I have to agree. At first, I would avoid ATRPMs simply because it would provide packages (using the same names) as the ones in Fedora. It took me a while before I realized that many of these "duplicate packages" were there because of some added feature which (I'm guessing) inherently couldn't be separated into parts (Modularity).
One example is ATRPMS' spamassassin package. As I understand it, ATRPMS spamassassin package makes use of Vipul's Razor (http://razor.sourceforge.net/) thereby increasing spamassassin's value. Unfortunately, spamassassin razor functionality probably couldn't be separated into an optional package and Axel decided to name the combined integrated package spamassassin (as opposed to, say, spamassassin-razor ... which, by the by, it still a kludge IMO).
Or his bugzilla seems to require ruby, ImageMagick, and perl-GD*. (again perhaps added functionality that couldn't be packaged separately and still calling it the same package).
Axel has, however, made very good decisions technically (like changing library names to include major versions so that different versioned libraries could be installed in parallel, kmdl has the ability to pull in the correct kernel modules for any arbitrary kernel version if they existed in the repository). That and he has packages that aren't available in other repos (like asterisk and mythtv) made me decide to use his repository as well.
As for some decisions that I'm half-and-half with, they would include using newer versions of packages (which didn't work for me because the newer version of mjpegtools wouldn't work) and the fact that there are times when there would be no compromising between his personal taste and that of others.
I think it's always good to take the good things from various schemes and throw away the bad ones to form a cohesive whole. If people could get over personal pride and bigotry, that is. --
Richi Plana