gnokii-0.6.13-1.fc5.rf incompatible with Fedora Extras

[Dag Wieers]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Rex Dieter wrote:

> Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > 
> >> whoever put gnokii-0.6.13-1.fc5.rf into their repo.  Please don't/stop.
> >> It's not ABI-compatible with gnokii from Fedora Extras.
> > 
> > And why exactly is that ? What requires ABI compatibility with gnokii ?
> 
> Besides, what's the point of duplicating Extras' pkgs, *especially* if
> they're incompatible?

I did not see this message earlier. But the answer should be quite obvious 
and I find the question a bit offensive.

I have been packaging gnokii before Fedora Extras existed. Fedora Extras 
introduced this packaged years after I was providing a package, and 
instead of looking what existed already and/or discussing changes they 
made they choose to make it incompatible with my version.

We were even packaging it for Fedora Core 1 and 2 before it entered Fedora 
Extras.

The question you are asking is exactly what has been wrong with Fedora 
from the start. It was not a community-project in the sense that they 
build bridges. It was more like making lots of noise about how they would 
build a new repository that would package everything from scratch 
explicitely without working what existed, making policy decisions against 
common sense, breaking existing repositories because they would become the 
authoritative place (one repository would rule them all), having support 
from Red Hat and then pressure people to join since alternatives would 
make no sense.

To me back then it looked much like a power struggle and it did get a few 
people inside Red Hat.

Then even when it was clear the Fedora as a project would not be able to 
provide certain packages from the US (with the public aid of Red Hat), 
Fedora people chose to start another new repository (Livna) instead of 
eg. a popular, existing repository called FreshRPMS.

And then you ask me what the point is of duplicating Extras packages 
after Fedora introduced incompatibilities ? 

Rewriting history ? :) Sigh.

That doesn't mean we won't be fixing this, but rathered because we are 
forced to than because we like the tactics involved.

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]