Currently Red Hat has really screwed up the Fedora.us->official Extras transition, I agree with that much. However, the Fedora.us packages have the nice property that they actually see some QA before getting published. Personally I see that as a good thing. The wrong typo/thinko in a spec file really can do some pretty serious damage to your system, and with the one-person repos I don't know who checks the packages at all. To me it sounds like a good idea that someone other than the packager gives the package a once-over before spreading it worldwide...
Fedora.us is mostly a one man project as well, that one man is Warren Togami. And rpm.livna.org is even more of a one man project than Fedora.us. In open source, most things are one person projects.
And with Fedora.us, where you have people who have never packaged an RPM before submitting SPEC files to the QA queue... Well, in those sorts of circumstances, you *really do* need some sort of QA.
But with, say, FreshRPMs.net, where Matthias has been building RPMs quite literally for years... Why, he really just doesn't need as much QA. The Quality Assurance in inherent in the fact that Matthias is a damn fine packager with plenty of experience.
Besides, it'd be very easy to argue that FreshRPMs.net has a /much/ larger user community than, say, rpm.livna.org. If Matthias makes a mistake in one of his packages, you can be sure his users will let them know right away, you can also be sure he'll fix it right away.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that the individuals of the major non-Fedora.us repos do indeed cooperate and coordinate their build efforts, spec files, and source tarballs with one another under the banner of RPMForge.net. (Nothing yet at that domain other than their email addresses, but you can expect the major repos to merge under that domain sometime in the future.)
I've sent a self introduction to the Fedora.us development list, so hopefully I'll be able to get the packages in QA soon.
You're wasting your time. *smile*
I was only joking here, of course. I never actually mean to disuade valient efforts.
Going with th others at the moment may work just fine, but might put you in a hole later; likely one that you can dig yourself out of if you know what you're doing, I admit. I at least wanted the option to stick with the Fedora packages.
I've been mixing fedora.us, rpm.livna.org, FreshRPMs, Dag, Dries, NewRPMs, and PlanetCCRMA for quite a long time now. I've never run into a serious problem. As a matter of fact, I've found that FreshRPMs/Dag/Dries/NewRPMs has often had newer versions sooner and higher quality packages than their corresponding duplicates in Extras/Livna (xine, mplayer, totem, and DVD stuffs come to mind here).
There are, of course, things in Extras/Livna that aren't in the other repos. I don't want to be downgrading the usefulness of Extras/Livna, they certainly belong in your repository configuration.
But I attribute repo mixing phobia to pure FUD, spread mostly by the Fedora.us folks.
You really should run into *very few* problems using all the high quality repositories available to the RPM user community. And if you do run into problems, there's nothing easier than 'rpm -e package'. :)