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On 09/10/2015 09:53 AM, Stephen
Gallagher wrote:
Those are valid points, but I think that there are alternative approaches to address them.The point of software is to provide a service to an end-user. Users don't run software because it has good packaging policies, they run software because it meets a need that they have. If they can't get that software from Fedora, they *will* get it from another source (or use a different OS that doesn't get in their way). I'll take a moment to remind people that two of Fedora's Four Foundations are "Features" and "First". We want Fedora to be the most feature-complete distribution available and we want to get there before anyone else does. I would say that holding to our no-bundling policy actively defeats our efforts on that score. Can containerization it be leveraged to handle the packages which require bundling? This way, we could maintain the principled stance, and use containers with bundling packages as a temporary measure. Secondly, I would argue that the 'Freedom' requirement results in more restrictions in functionality than the 'no-bundling' requirement. We deal with that by having specific 'rpmfusion' repositories, and this workaround is well known, documented and accepted---so maybe another approach is to have a 'rpmfusion-bundled' repo? I think we should really pause and think about what does the 'does not care' mindset entail. It's not just the attitude towards bundling: it extends to security problems, integration issues, and who knows what other aspect of the product. I concede that it's, as you said, a list of the same tired arguments---but they do have a point! I think it is a mistake to declare defeat, even if it's nominally only on the specific issue of bundling.The reason for this proposal is relatively simple: we know the advantages to unbundling, particularly with security and resource- usage. However, the world's developer community largely *does not care*. We fought the good fight, we tried to bring people around to seeing our reasoning and we failed. I do understand the pragmatic motivation of your proposal, but we have to calibrate it against the real and possible detriments. Taken to the extreme, an overly permissive approach _could_ introduce enough crud to affect the entire system. Please forgive me for sounding alarmist and cynical but I am old enough to remember the 1990's FTP collections. They were full of projects started by well-intentioned, pragmatic developers, which evolved into an unmaintaintainable mess ---I am so glad that we left that behind. |
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