On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 07:46:23AM -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
So, I'm feeling a bit worried. Does anyone have a sense of how much these repositories should be trusted?
Core, Extras, and Livna are designed to cooperate and not upgrade each other's packages. Anything else depends on the repository maintainer. If a repo replaces Core packages, it may or may not interfere with Core updates, Extras, Livna, etc., depending on the extent of those replacements. Some would argue that if you are replacing Core components, it isn't really Fedora anymore, and you shouldn't report bugs to Fedora about your system in that case. You could try picking and choosing just the packages you want from the 3rd party repos and install those manually. However, in many cases, Core libraries are being replaced to add functionality that was missing from the Core version, or programs are recompiled with different options to enable support for additional features, e.g. MP3 support, which the program you want might need. Therefore, it isn't always an option to use a 3rd party repo in a piecemeal manner. In fact, the maintainers of those repos may frown upon that, since it causes them more of a support headache when users report bugs which are really only due to them not using all the packages from said 3rd party repo. You could go the other way and completely switch to some of the larger repos which have "everything" including updates, etc., but then you are diverging from Fedora even more. The proper solution to these problems of course is to fix or enhance the Core, Extras, and Livna packages so the 3rd party repos don't need to replace them, or for the 3rd party repo maintainers to cooperate with Fedora by contributing directly to Core, Extras, and Livna. Some of the issues are technical problems with the design of the software, such as the aforementioned MP3 support--those kinds of features should be modular so that they can be loaded at runtime from a separate package which provides the legally questionable components. Then that package could go into e.g. Livna.