[RFC] additional enhancements for RHEL3/4 for Dell system-specificrepo

[Dhawal Doshy]

Michael_E_Brown at dell.com wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com 
>> [mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Dhawal Doshy
> 
>>> WARNING: These are system-specific. Make sure you download 
>> and install 
>>> the specific one for the system you are running on, or you 
>> may not get 
>>> content appropriate for your system.
>> This is cool.. but aren't you guys (methinks you, matt or someone from
>> dell) also contributing to / packaging for EPEL (firmware and 
>> other things).. which maybe is duplication of efforts (unless 
>> i am missing something).
> 
> I and several other Dell folks are, indeed, EPEL contributors. I am
> pushing all of my open source projects through the EPEL/Fedora
> repositories. This includes libsmbios, firmware-tools, and
> firmware-addon-dell. It is my hope to eventually have every distro have
> these tools natively available.
> 
> This does not conflict at all with the Dell repos. I make the same
> versions of these utilities available through the Dell repo, but there
> are a lot of things in the Dell repo that can never be pushed through
> EPEL/Fedora/etc because they are not open source.
> 
> The idea behind this new repository is that there is a distinct and
> unique repository per-os, per-system. That is over 200 repositories.
> What this means is that (completely made up example) if I have a
> specific megaraid driver for pe1234 and pe2468 that are both mutually
> incompatible, I can push the correct one for each system into the
> system-specific repo. With just one repository, like the EPEL repo, the
> current Dell software repo, etc, we would have to break one or the other
> system.
> 
> This also fits really well into the current way that Dell tests and
> releases software. We generally test per-platform and release
> per-platform. It also means that we can 'freeeze' a platform software
> repo at the last supported version of each piece of software. That way
> you don't do a 'yum upgrade' one day and find that, eg. OMSA has been
> upgraded to a new version that no longer supports the system you are
> running on.

ok, so i was missing something ;-) great work there..