On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 11:51 AM, Bill Nottingham <notting@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
To allow or not allow bundling is the small side point here - the questions
should be more of "Are we a distribution of packages? Are we an OS? Where
do we see the distribution/OS fit in how software is consumed and provided?
Is that different for a Workstation vs an Atomic host?" Answer those big
questions, and the questions on what to do along Ring0->RingN, what bundling
to allow, etc. should fall out.
To take this comment from Bill a little further.
Assume software X with all its bundled dependencies are not part of Fedora due to to current policy. If that software is still desired by users to be deployable on Fedora - that should be possible. After all Freedom is one of the foundation of Fedora. How should Fedora enable that even if it is not in Fedora? If it is coming from a 3rd party repo - the big question is does it look and behave like a 3rd party application? or does it try to look and behave like an in-distro application from Fedora.
Assume software X with all its bundled dependencies are not part of Fedora due to to current policy. If that software is still desired by users to be deployable on Fedora - that should be possible. After all Freedom is one of the foundation of Fedora. How should Fedora enable that even if it is not in Fedora? If it is coming from a 3rd party repo - the big question is does it look and behave like a 3rd party application? or does it try to look and behave like an in-distro application from Fedora.
If it is the latter - then we have failed to set guidelines or examples for 3rd parties. The Linux FileSystem Hierarchy has been in existent for a really long time, it benefited fro the practices of UNIX development before it. In particular, there is a clear demarcation for add-on software installation [1]
If you take that into consideration, then as you move the line between distribution and OS, packages that fall on the OS side should maintain unbundled status. Packages that are on distribution side should have more flexibility, and packages from 3rd party repo should definitely not conflict with Fedora's.
While the number of packages in Fedora is impressive, it is no where near the where the opensource community is headed [2]. Annual surveys by BlackDuck [3] continue to show this exponential growth. This growth pattern in open source software means that Fedora will never be able to ship everything. So HOW is the Fedora user free to leverage the Fedora platform to run software that is not shipped in the distribution. This is part of the active guidance that Greg was missing when he blogged about Fedora working against upstream. Creating that guidance will have a direct relationship to the bundling/unbundling policy
-subhendu
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