Feature changed by: Atri Bhattacharya (badshah400) Feature #307489, revision 8 Title: Combine repositories! openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Jason Fergus (jfergus) Description: openSUSE would be at least 50x easier to install / maintain if they took a different approach to the repositories. Look at Fedora. They dropped Core and Extras and made it one big distribution, then all the dag, livna and freshrpms combined into rpmfusion.org. This is what should / needs to happen with openSUSE. For someone who is used to doing it, this is probably not that big of a deal. To someone who is used to installing Windows and having to scour the Internet for drivers, it's not that big of deal. To someone coming from using mostly Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian, this is HUGE. Fedora is simple, add rpmfusion.org and probably the adobe yum repository and you have access to everything from drivers to flash. In Debian, just enable non-free and contrib, then the debian-multimedia (for mplayer, mythtv etc) and you're all set. Ubuntu really only needs medibuntu repositories and you can get everything you need for a decent setup. openSUSE has a ton that need to be enabled. Emulators, Pacman, nvidia, etc. While it is nice and simple that you have a 'one click' install for most things, it still would be easier / simpler to just run 'zypper install atari800' without having to add the Emulator repository. This and the menus are the only thing that really throws me off of running openSUSE. Discussion: #1: Stephan Binner (beineri) (2009-08-23 15:18:53) Have you heard about http://en.opensuse.org/Contrib ? :-) #2: Jason Fergus (jfergus) (2009-08-23 19:43:34) Apparently I hadn't! When did they implement this? I tried finding something along these lines during my last romp in openSUSE land. Which was 11.2m1 if I recall. This is the right direction! #3: Sascha Peilicke (saschpe) (2010-06-24 18:26:30) Unfortunately contrib is not as open as it should be, lots of package are still to be found only in specialized repos (like Application:Geo, Education or Games just to name a few) and lots of submitrequests are declined. So contrib doesn't contain that much of additional software. If all things lying around in the various OBS repos would really dribble into the contrib repo than it might be of use. Otherwise the repo situation remains fragmented. Just as an example, I currently have 24 (!!!) repositories enabled, which is _far_ to much. #4: Sascha Peilicke (saschpe) (2010-06-24 18:29:33) Actually, this makes me languish for the Fedora package contribution model where the central repository is administered by Red Hat employes and community members. Within openSUSE the latter are still second class citizen. Sigh! #5: Pavol Rusnak (prusnak) (2010-06-25 14:09:23) (reply to #4) If the submitrequests are declined there is always a reason for that (usually the package is not good enough). In Fedora you also have review before puhsing package into Rawhide. So please stop spreading FUD. I cannot imaging how to make Contrib "more open" than it is now. #6: Sascha Peilicke (saschpe) (2010-07-09 11:17:41) (reply to #5) Sorry, it was not my intend to spread FUD as you call it. Nonetless, Contrib contains only about 700 packages (that is debuginfo and debugsource included), which is not all that much. Consider, if I want to have merkaartor installed, I need the Application:Geo repo. Then I've got GNUstep installed, which is in Education, libfann, which is in devel:libraries:c++ and finally some games, which are found in the Games repository. While it is great that we have so many devel repositories in the buildservice, I'd love to see, if stable packages would move into Contrib or OSS right away instead of staying in all those custom themed repositories forever. Maybe we should put a poll on opensuse.org to see how many repositories people have typically enabled, to see what I mean... + #7: Atri Bhattacharya (badshah400) (2010-07-09 12:20:35) (reply to #6) + The best solution, in my opinion, is not to combine repositories [since + it could lead to packages with bad scripts/mistakes in packaging get in + all the time, due to the difficulty of maintaining a repo the bigger it + is], but to have a great one-click install process, backed by a useful + search engine capable of showing preferred repo to install package + from, and a link to that search engine from the default browser + bookmarks. No one even needs to know how to subscribe to repositories, + and they should not need to know ideally. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/307489