Prezados amigos, recentemente escrevi uma matéria sobre o desktop Enlightenment para a Revista Fedora Brasil e o artigo acabou tomando uma proporção maior do que o esperado. Troquei alguns e-mails o empacotador responsável pelo E17 no Fedora e conforme a conversa foi evoluindo ele concordou em nos escrever um pequeno texto sobre o repositório e sobre como iniciou os trabalhos de empacotamento.
O Professor Gregory Kriehn leciona no curso de engenharia elétrica no CalTech e eu gostaria de pedir que algum dos nossos tradutores mais experientes assumisse o texto (que segue abaixo). Claro, tanto o nome do autor quanto o do tradutor constarão na edição.

Grande abraço a todos

--------------------------------------
A number of years ago I sought to gather all of the personal notes that
I had developed with respect to RedHat and Fedora Linux into a
comprehensive set of online notes.  The notes were developed primarily
as a way to have a centralized location for me to remember how to
perform various tasks in Linux, although I found that people from all
over the world also benefited from them.  Sometime after I started doing
this, Stanton Finley retired his Fedora Core notes, and so I became one
of the new destinations for HOWTOs with regard to Fedora.

Over the years I have also became increasing frustrated with both Gnome
and KDE.  I feel that the Gnome developers have dumbed down the Windows
Manager to the point that no one is allowed to (or able to) configure
anything, and I have always found KDE too buggy for my personal taste.
Between Fedora Core 1 and Fedora Core 5, I looked for an alternative
Windows Manager that balanced issues such as speed and simplicity with
ease of use and an ability to configure it to my liking until I came
upon Didier Casse's E17 Alpha packages (Fedora Core 5'ish).  For a span
of about 2 years I worked with Didier off and on to help debug and
configure some of his packages until he became too busy to keep up his
repository.  He eventually passed the torch onto me, and so I decided to
create my own repository to keep up the tradition of offering updated
monthly E17 snapshots.

More recently, Enlightenment has moved from CVS to SVN, and has
undergone some fundamental changes with the deprecation of Epeg and the
introduction of the Eina library, and so it took considerably longer
than I would have liked to develop a comprehensive set of Enlightenment
packages for Fedora 10.  This was complicated by the introduction of
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) into the Fedora Updates
Repository, in addition to Enlightenment itself.  I originally had
planned on removing any packages that had made it into the Fedora
Repository to avoid conflicts and slowly phase out the Kriehn Repository
once E17 reached a point of stable maturity.  However, I have found that
the E17 packages currently within the Fedora Repository are based upon
an old set of CVS packages, and that the Fedora maintainer has become to
busy to update or maintain them.  Because the older packages conflict
with the newer code in SVN (primarily as a result of the new Eina
library), I have therefore decided to continue to offer a full set of
E17 packages that include the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries,
Enlightenment and its add-on Modules, as well as a number of other
Enlightenment Applications that are at various degrees of maturity (or
immaturity, whatever the case may be) within the Kriehn Repository.
To avoid conflicts with the Fedora Repository, I have ensured that the
version numbers on my packages are greater than what is offered in
Fedora Updates.  This way, if you try to install an Enlightenment
package, it will default to the Kriehn Repository opposed to Fedora
Updates.

Why not just become a Fedora maintainer myself?  Well, I hack code in my
spare time and use Linux because it increases my productivity as an
Engineering Professor, but I found Fedora's Packaging Guidelines are too
obtuse and time consuming for me to become a full time maintainer.  I am
afraid that the same thing would happen to me as what happened to the
old Fedora Enlightenment Maintainer, and as a result, E17 packages would
languish and die once again on Fedora.  I gave "Becoming a Fedora
Maintainer" a trial run and helped push xosview back into the distro,
but simply found the process too convoluted and involved.  I understand
the need for exacting guidelines -- it has helped Fedora become a world
class Linux distribution in recent years, but I simply do not have the
time to officially maintain 80 Enlightenment packages for Fedora.  In a
similar manner, I looked toward RPMFusion, but found that they have
decided to adopt similar Packaging Guidelines as Fedora.  As a result, I
find it simplest to run my automated scripts that will pull source from
SVN, package them into tarballs, create and sign the RPMS, and upload
them to my server.  I have tried to adhere as closely as possible to
Fedora's SPEC Guidelines wherever possible, and have had great help from
Vasile Chelban in bringing them into proper shape with mock.  Vasile has
also been kind enough to mirror my repository and create x86_64 packages
from the i386 packages I have developed and automatically rsync them
back to my server.  So far it has been a great working relationship.

We are currently looking at creating a local SVN directory where we can
place the build scripts and the SPEC files into in order to provide more
robust (and a bit more timely, perhaps) E17 packages.  So the future of
the Kriehn Repository and E17 look bright, even though it got off to a
rocky and delayed start with respect to Fedora 10.  Thanks for your
patience!
------------------------------------
Henrique "LonelySpooky" Junior
------------------------------
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates?!"