On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 13:23 -0500, Christian Schaller wrote: > Hi Adam, > It is not really a question of trying to be tricky here. I understand > that us trying to find a solution both sides can live with here feels > frustrating to you, as it constantly butts head against where you feel > the boundary should be, but trust me the situation is frustrating for > us too. > > But I agree that a tenable solution is not likely to be found in this > direction, so I think what we need is to take a step back and some > timeout to try think outside the box about this problem. Your idea > from yesterday to enable features such as this in a differently > branded product has some obvious issues to me, but at least it was a > good example of someone trying to come up with a solution to the > disagreement by not getting locked into the the context of the current > debate, and thus maybe something we should at least think about. > Anyway maybe some brainstorming is what is needed here. Yeah, sorry, I think I got it out of my system now. :) I didn't really bring up differently-branded products as a concrete suggestion for what the Fedora Desktop team should do, just as a useful reference point for the wider debate: it's a way of reinforcing the point that the really problematic issue here is the 'Fedora/not-Fedora' distinction. It's absolutely fine for Korora etc to do whatever they want because it's very clear that doesn't come with the endorsement of the Fedora project/distribution. But I expect people who use Korora have an explicit or implicit understanding that Korora, to some degree, is standing behind the stuff they're including: if they install Korora and then install a couple of updates and Flash breaks, they're going to complain to Korora, right? They see it as a piece of Korora. The practical suggestion I find most interesting is a *cross-distribution* infrastructure/platform for the provision and distribution of third-party software, quite simply. My take is that the fact there's nothing like this that all or at least most of the major vendors agree on is much more of a problem for both users and distributors of third party stuff than any single distro's exact perspective on how far it should isolate itself from third-party bits. As we've already gone over, I don't think the degree of isolation from third-party bits that Fedora currently insists on is so great as to form a major barrier *in itself*. It's also worth noting that Chrome/Flash etc and NVIDIA are kind of different problems. NVIDIA is a very tricky case much more because of the technical details of that particular case than just because it's third party software. I haven't really seen anyone who had much of a problem with the *theory* of how to install NVIDIA, which is more or less 'enable the magic repo and then install a couple of packages'. The problems people have in that case really are technical implementation issues: specifically, getting nouveau out of the way of nvidia is kind of tricky and the details seem to change from release to release, and then Fedora is rather ahead of NVIDIA in its kernel schedule - so quite often we bump a stable Fedora release to a kernel version which NVIDIA isn't ready for yet, so even if you have the akmod for NVIDIA rather than the kmod installed, everything goes sideways. My point there is that we should probably think harder about the Chrome/Flash/whatever case - the case of things that are basically 'apps' sitting quite lightly on top of the distribution 'platform' - than the tricky NVIDIA case, which is kind of a special one and requires special handling. For the 'app' case, I really think that having a *single* distribution platform for all the major distros would make everyone's life a lot easier, and would not be hard at all to reconcile with Fedora's fundamental principles - we just have to isolate access to that platform to whatever degree is agreed to meet our principles, and I think we're all agreed that that degree doesn't need to be *excessively* onerous, just enough to keep Fedora's principles clear and the separation of responsibility clear. Of course, this requires both building the infrastructure/framework and the distributions committing to *some* kind of platform that the third party distributors can rely on - even if it's as basic as 'we'll give you glibc and an input layer and ALSA/PulseAudio and maybe we'll commit to a couple of toolkits being available, anything else you can bundle yourself or manage the cross-distro compatibility some other way'. But, at least IMHO, that's the approach that provides the best payback. It's already what happens, in effect - most third party distributors don't build tweaked and tested packages for all distros, they just build a huge static bundle on top of glibc and ship it in a tarball (or a 'dumb' RPM/DEB package which doesn't really use any distro dependencies, it's just being used as a container). But we don't have a nice neat distribution platform for their tarballs/dumb RPM or DEB packages, so users have to go out and find them in a dozen different locations, and there's lots of silliness in how they work probably because all the distros aren't getting together and providing some simple groundwork and rules. If we just had a nice Software/Steam-ish platform where you'd know all the major third-party stuff was available, with a decent interface and screenshots and reviews and all that gumph that's the current vogue, it'd be a much nicer experience, even if ultimately what you got was the same big static bundle you get from a tarball/dumb package today. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
