On 10/14/07, Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de> wrote:
Hi,
after the creation of the [core] repository and the cleanup of old [current] it should be clear which packages should be in [core] and which don't.
But the border between [extra] and [community] does not seem to be that sharp. Does [extra] only include the most important and essential packages? Is [community] only a playground and a repo full of alpha releases?
Defining [extra] in a clear way should make it easier to cleanup this repo, too. We still have a lot of unmaintained or outdated packages.
I see a lot of people defining the difference here as "official" and "unofficial" packages. Personally, I think that is slightly rude to the TUs. It's like saying "you guys aren't as good as us" or "our packages are better". This just isn't the case. While I don't like this distinction, it's pretty much the only one we have. The way I look at it, is simple popularity. A package goes from unsupported to community, then community to extra. This is the way we've done a few things. What I don't like, however, is stuff floating in extra that only 3 or 4 people use. That's a little silly. If you were to ask me, I would define extra as "a set of packages that are either necessary to any modern linux distro (apache, X11, etc etc) OR are popular enough to warrant official developer oversight".