Announcing RPM Fusion
Hans de Goede announced on the Fedora-devel the creation of RPM Fusion.
RPM Fusion aims to bring together many packagers from various 3rd party repos and build a single add-on repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
We don’t have a repository ready for end users yet, but we are actively working on merging the following ones:
We will have two distinct repositories: free and non-free. Free will contain Open Source Software (as defined by the Fedora Packaging Guidelines) which can’t be included in Fedora – for example because it might be patent encumbered in the US. Non-free will contain everything else which is not free software (as defined by the Fedora Licensing Guidelines), like software with public available source-code that has “no commercial use” restrictions or the graphics drivers from AMD and Nvidia.
From an end user view point this is great news. For a long time Freshrpms and Livna had many overlapping packages and using one meant avoiding the other. While many Fedora developers and users (including myself) recommended using Livna, all knew neither choice was perfect. Hopefully with better coordinated effort all new Fedora users will find their needs met by a single additional software repository.
The work on Fedora 8 is progressing, with a Test2 release in a few days. While I doubt the repo merge will be ready for F8, it seems perfectly possible as a lot is external and all the previously wasted duplicate work can now be put to good use for infrastructure.
Good news.