[elrepo-devel] collaboration with RPM Fusion

[Phil Perry]

On 09/07/12 06:26, Ken Dreyer wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm a package maintainer with the Fedora, EPEL, and RPM Fusion
> projects, and I'm interested in seeing RPM Fusion and ELRepo
> collaborate more, if possible. I figured I would try to reach out.
>
> RPM Fusion has focused almost exclusively on Fedora until recently,
> and last month we formally released several of our multimedia userland
> apps for EL-6. However, we're holding off on doing any EL kernel
> modules for now, because myself and a couple others[1] want to be able
> to use the kABI stuff that you guys have been using.
>
> Right now it looks like the package sets don't overlap much between
> RPM Fusion and ELRepo, but maybe that could change in the future?
>
> Please let me know any thoughts or feedback.
>
> - Ken
>
> [1] http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-developers/2011-December/010964.html


Hi Ken,

My apologies for not replying sooner - I'm normally the person that 
picks up such enquiries and you just happened to catch me on a 
particularly busy $work cycle... but I'm here now :-)

We've been in touch with Nicolas privately, and I've certainly 
"borrowed" from his experiences with our nvidia and fglrx graphics 
driver packages.

Elrepo has no issue with collaborating with other 3rd party repos for 
EL. Our remit is very focused on only providing kmod packages for 
improved hardware support in EL. To that end there is little/no overlap 
with other 3rd party repos as I'm not aware of any other 3rd party repos 
offering EL kmod packages. Thus elrepo should work well/be compatible 
with other 3rd party repos for end users. When we started out Dag at 
rpmforge quickly deprecated his kernel/hardware related packages in 
favor of elrepo [1].

In addition to the kmod packages mentioned above, elrepo does also 
provide related userland applications/utilities (generally required for 
repo closure etc) and more recently we have been asked to look at 
providing some of the vaapi layers although personally I'm not convinced 
this is within our current remit - this is something I see better suited 
to being hosted in another 3rd party repo such as rpmfusion.

WRT our kmod packages, we don't do anything special. For the most part 
we use upstream's Driver Update Programme (DUP) to deliver 3rd party 
drivers in a conveniently packaged kABI-tracking kmod format. We use 
upstream's kmodtool and only make minor modifications to that where 
absolutely necessary. Our goal is to use the framework Red Hat provides 
rather than reinvent this particular wheel. How that will fit with a 
repository like yourselves who also operate in Fedora space where the 
game has moved on somewhat is a matter of policy for yourselves to 
decide, but we are more than happy to offer advice based upon our own 
considerable experiences with kmod building on RHEL.

Finally, elrepo welcomes contributors. We would welcome contributors 
from rpmfusion who wish to add kmod packages to elrepo rather than 
duplicate packages across multiple repositories. We now have an 
infrastructure in place to facilitate this and it has always been a 
primary goal for elrepo to be open to contributors. We primarily started 
elrepo to provide a framework to contribute updated 3rd party drivers 
for EL as such a framework didn't really exist in any of the 3rd party 
repositories at the time. Now that elrepo and that framework does exist, 
we hope others will choose to use and contribute to it.

Regards,

Phil

[1] 
http://dag.wieers.com/blog/improved-rhel-centos-and-scientific-linux-hardware-support