On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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*. <snip NVIDIA> > 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. So if one were to go to all of the infrastructure work and cross-distro collaboration and get vendor buy-in, would you view that single "platform" (or AppStore or whatever) as something that a Fedora software installer could point to and include in searches done in the software installer? josh -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
