[Rpm-ecosystem] New RPM-Extras repository

[Florian Festi]

Hi!

For quite a while it has become apparent that there are many scripts,
macro files and other rpm related pieces that all the different
distributions maintain on their own. We have been trying to get some of
this merged upstream but there is only so much that can be done there.
Some things are just not suited for the rpm repository.

Nevertheless having things scattered is not a good solution either. So
we just created a new repository: rpm-extras [1]

There are two major uses we see for this repo:

1) Distributions can put in their scripts and macros and collaborate to
merge them into more stable and general versions.

2) Dependency generators for more exotic file types.

>From the repo README.md:

We encourage distributions to add their own scripts here. It is
perfectly fine to have multiple versions of same or similar scripts in
the repositories. Please create a sub directory with the name of the
distribution in brpscripts/ or macros.d/. The idea is to collect the
different implementations and merge them to more general, refined and
stable versions. This repository is meant to help with this process. But
we are aware that the needs of the distributions differ. It is perfectly
fine to end up with multiple variants of the same scripts without an
perspective to get them merged. We still hope that for most cases we can
settle for one, two or may be three different variants at most.

Although this repository will not follow the release cycle of rpm the
content is supposed to be compatible with the current stable release of
rpm. We do not collect all versions of the scripts used is some release
of each distro. As a general rule of thumb: one version per distribution
max. Separate version may be acceptable for down stream (enterprise/long
term support) distributions if they differ in the policy they implement.

The idea is that access to this repository is less strict than for the
RPM repository. Distributions are encourage to take responsibility for
their sub directories throughout the repository. For files shared
between distributions it is expected to discuss changes on the
rpm-ecosystem mailing list and to create pull requests on Git Hub or
send patches for review.

Florian

[1] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm-extras
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