On 05/26/2014 10:22 PM, Paul Wise wrote:
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 11:11 AM, John Morris wrote:Fedora packager here, accustomed to a third approach.How do they do it in Fedora?
Brain-dead compartmentalization: separate package repos containing separate builds for each distro release.
Debian backports, IIUC, solves a problem that plagues Red Hat Enterprise Linux: users have a way to get updated versions of selected packages, while enjoying the otherwise stable release.
The Fedora EPEL community project gets halfway there by separately providing packages not available in RHEL (the stable distro).
However EPEL policy disallows packages that conflict with mainline RHEL packages. In order to get updated versions of anything in the main distribution, an EPEL packager has to go through all sorts of antics to rename executables, libraries, headers, etc. and fix the build and run-time systems make it all work together, a royal PITA.
Needless to say, we get very few such packages in EPEL, and it's often easier for folks to maintain their own personal repos of back-ported packages, which you can imagine is neither easy nor efficient.
John