2007/10/17, Paul Mattal <paul@mattal.com>:
To Aaron's point about too many repos, I would say: There's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to move packages easily from one repo to another with one commandline-- that's what repoman is trying to achieve. When repos are really that lightweight it stops being a big deal if you have one more and starts being beneficial to have a more detailed classification of your packages.
Repoman? Until it'll became a reality - it annoys me when it gets mentioned as a solution to anything. Sorry. :-/ What about all those users who will have to change their pacman.conf every time? The separation of extra gives no good results, zero, void, nil.
Of course, if the argument is that devs should maintain packages in [community] because the distinction between devs and TUs isn't important, another solution would be to flatten things and have [core], [mantle] and [extra] and let TUs and devs maintain packages in [extra].
Another thing would be to have community integrated in extra. This would also eliminate this issue that is annoying for users and TUs in current situation: 1) packages in community are built against core/extra: 2) testing is filled with db/openssl/gnome/anything-with-so-bump packages issue #1: users that use testing have to rebuild their community packages by themselves 3) packages get moved from testing to core/extra - at this time all needed packages are already rebuilt so nothing in core/extra gets broken issue #2: all community packages that depend on those moved packages are broken now. Users start complaining, TUs are in a rush for rebuilds. With either community-testing repo or community integrated into extra these issues disappear.
But I still think it's worth separating the devs and the TUs.. this is not to say we shouldn't poach regularly from the TU pool to devs, but the TU post is a great way to get yourself trained to be a good dev. Look at how many came through that way!
Separation of devs and TUs is not the same as separation of their packages into different repos just by factor of package ownership. Seriously, what's wrong with main/mantle packages staying in extra and moving unimportant to community? What's the difference between packages maintained by developers and _trusted_ users? Community packages are not system-critical anyway. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)