On 10/25/19 10:15 AM, Randy Barlow wrote:
On Fri, 2019-10-25 at 09:43 +0200, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
That is true, but the wording used also implied that this design has
not been
considered.
The question of whether other designs have been considered has been
raised many times over the years, and I've not seen it claimed that
yes, these specific designs were considered and were rejected. I also
don't see it documented at
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/modularity that these suggested
ideas were considered. If people keep asking if these designs were
considered and don't get answers, it does become reasonable to think
that maybe they weren't.
We reviewed *many* alternate / existing solutions to this problem both
at the start and over the course of the project. In fact, I have given
talks on these reviews at various conferences (IIRC flock, fosdem, and
devconf.cz). Off the top of my head:
* The two most promising candidates, Gentoo's slots (etc) and nix both
require a substantial user experience change both as a command line
person and in how / where things land in the OS. We believe this to be
an insurmountable change for Fedora users. Also, Gentoo's slots are more
sophisticated than they were ~5 years ago when we started this project
so they definitely appear more "tempting" now.
* alternatives infra (for lack of a better name): doesn't really solve
the problem of parallel availability without massive name mangling and,
potentially, fragile symlinking around the system.
* many repos: considered to be non-performant in dnf (although that has
gotten *much* better), very confusing for users, not discoverable.
* compat-libs (or compat lib style): not discoverable, name mangling
* language specific lib management (e.g. rvm, virtualenv): completely
different by language, preferred tool changing over time, led by
language communities (vs the distro)
there are definitely others that I am not thinking of at the moment.
However, I wanted to try to get this out quickly.
Basically, everything we looked at either, a) was a massive user
experience shift for Fedora users (way more than even some of the broken
things we have in modularity). Or, b) solved the problem in the "wrong"
part of the stack (in my opinion), meaning we should be able to do this
in the package manager or "in the OS." However, Stephen's blog post
about the requirements is a way better treatise on the reasons why the
alternatives didn't work.
We (Stephen Gallagher and I) discussed me writing a blog post to revisit
these past questions when Zbigniew raised the question the other day.
However, I haven't written it yet.
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