Well I'm all for this co-op. I had heard about it before but it didn't seem as organized at the time. Even now the rpmforge.net website is very slow and lacks a lot of detail. And at the moment it isn't a unified repo. It appears you still have to setup 5 repos in your config. So far I don't need anything from their repos (except rar). Maybe it will stay that way. Hopefully it becomes very easy to plug EF into FC+FE. I still think RF should (and it appears they do) contribute packages into FE. IMO it is better that FE grows in size and quality than to have separate repos. Regards
There used to be a "group of 5" - FreshRPMS, Dag Wieers, Dries, NewRPMs and ATrpms, who all coordinated their packages and did their best not to duplicate each others work. They are now known as RPMforge collectively (http://rpmforge.net/), and it appears that their intentions are slightly different to Fedora Extras:
} Fedora Extras (as the name implies) is Fedora Core specific, RPMforge } includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Yellow Dog (matthias), Aurora Sparc } (dries) and Alpha packages (bert). } } RPMforge also includes packages that Fedora Extras for various reasons } cannot include. } } } > Out aim is to push as much as we can of our packages into extras. } } Our aim is to keep things from being Fedora specific. :)
(from http://lists.freshrpms.net/pipermail/freshrpms-list/2005-February/012587.htm...)
http://lists.freshrpms.net/pipermail/freshrpms-list/2005-April/012854.html states you should be able to use Fedora Extras and RPMForge together, and people generally collaborate to make things work together wherever possible.
If you have specific questions, freshrpms-list seems to be the place to start.