Thread: Requesting that private repos be taken down
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Ed_ is offline Ed_
2009-06-19 , 21:44
Posts: 93 | Thanked: 73 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#26
Originally Posted by zerojay View Post
And these situations wouldn't happen if the repo owner would do his own QA as he/she should, which the original poster said was impossible for some reason... and I still haven't heard anyone explain why it's impossible when plenty of other external repositories do exactly that. (The repo owner being lazy isn't a good reason.)
It's almost impossible for owner to check all possible conflicts with software from other repositories.
It's better to show on the example: Owner of repository A releases new version of library a to his/her own repository. There are 60 other repositories, which potentially have conflicted version of library a. Moreower, new repositories are being created each day and new versions of library a or other libraries/applications potentially conflicting with each other are uploaded to those repositories every day or more often. What kind of proper QA our owner should perform and how often? Should he install all possible combination of applications/libraries before releasing library a? I doubt that anyone can do that. But in one well maintained centralized repository (Extras) it's not a big deal to check.

Also, if Extras is so easy to get into, we're going to come to a point where QA won't be so minimal anymore because there will just be a flood of apps coming in. At some point, it'll need to be capped... and when that happens, someone's probably going to start another repo.
We're far from it. Look at big distros like Debian & Ubuntu. They have a lot more packages in their repository and somehow manage to maintain them and test.
More packages means more users and more testers, not only more maintenance work.

This feels like a microcosm of Linux itself, doesn't it? Why isn't there just one distro of Linux?
No it doesn't. It feels like maintaining package base well-known and proved way. Look around - you'll easily find a lot of examples.
Last edited by Ed_; 2009-06-19 at 21:56.
 

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