[PlanetCCRMA] Planet CCRMA - Fedora compatibility

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> The successor of RedHat, Fedora, is an
> apt based distribution (like Planet
> CCRMA packages are). 

I don't think apt is yet central to the Fedora Core distribution. The
main package installation is still (I think) done through up2date, which
can at this point also support yum (and apt) urls - a change in the
right direction. Yum is included in FC1, apt, I believe, is not (I have
to check, my FC1 machine - well, just a hard disk - is offline at the
moment). 

Maybe we are talking about different things. "Fedora" means two things
at this point.

a) the Fedora Core RedHat project. This is the result of merging (a
still ongoing process) the RedHat "consumer" distribution (ie: RedHat 9)
with the independent (till now) Fedora project. Fedora Core 1 was
released last week and I'm working on "porting" Planet CCRMA to it. 

b) the Fedora project. An independent project that aimed at providing a
central repository of high quality packages for RedHat (working in a
similar fashion to Debian). 

The RedHat Fedora project will eventually incorporate third party
packages in the same or similar way that the (formerly independent)
Fedora project did. So far that has not been merged and the only way to
submit packages is through Fedora.us (not the RedHat project). 

> I included the Fedora
> repositories for RH9 (and Livna - the
> "unofficial" packages of Fedora) in my
> apt.sources and made an "apt-update" for
> tests purposes. I just tried to
> install some packages and apt tells me
> that will uninstall lots of packages
> of CCRMA (I think that under Fedora
> Core will be the same).

Probably not, it depends on what you are tring to install. I'm currently
working on rebuilding the Planet CCRMA packages for Fedora Core 1. 

What was going to be erased?

> The incompatibility are related in most
> cases to video applications (Mplayer
> in my test, that is part of Fedora/Livna). 
> 
> In Fedora site there's an alert for
> this in here:
> 
> http://www.fedora.us/wiki/RepositoryMixingProblems

That is true not only for Fedora, but for any two independent
repositories trying to work together (freshrpms, atrpms, etc, etc).
Fedora developers (at least some of them) strongly believe that there
has to be one and only one repository to solve this. I disagree. 

That sort of ignores the "real world" out there, alternative
repositories will always exist. There's also the matter of diversity.
Diversity is good, a monoculture is not good. 

> They propose to independent packagers
> to submit their work under a
> bureaucratic submission procedure that
> I don't think is good for the Planet
> update dynamics. 

I don't think it would even be possible at this point. The main problem
is the lack of ALSA support in the current Fedora Core release. Once
that is fixed it will be possible to integrate many of the Planet CCRMA
applications into the (probably) Fedora Extras repository (if I
understand things correctly). 

I could submit the non-alsa packages but that is the least interesting
slice of Planet CCRMA... Or I could submit the OSS/ALSA packages and
have them built for OSS only but then, if I follow their naming
guidelines, their packages will override Planet CCRMA's and that is just
wrong again. 

> Am I wrong or Fedora and Planet
> CCRMA are (or will be) incompatible?

Fedora Core 1 will be compatible with Planet CCRMA in the same sense
that RedHat 9 (or 8.0 or 7.3) are today. That does not mean that ALL
extra repositories will be compatible, and that not only includes Fedora
but all other apt repositories out there.... ovciously I should to work
to iron out any incompatibilites that may exist. 

-- Fernando