2009/11/21 Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger@xxxxxxxxx>:
On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 12:26:38PM +0100, Yaakov Nemoy wrote:> Actually I'd expect such a repository to either starve out soon or to evolve > into a huge Fedora "-media", "-tube", "-tunes", "-flickr" or similar. That is exactly the idea. 1) It starves, and then we say, told you so, now get back to doing real packaging work. 2) It turns into a blob of a media repository, attracts a certain kind of attention and grows into its own project, i don't see anything wrong there either. This has some potential for alot of people, such as OLPC. Having Fedora's expertise on how to do packaging right means this project gets better quality too. 3) It finds a middle ground between the two. Now we're stuck with the tricky part where we have to evaluate if it fits in Fedora or not. The catch is we can't predict how it will develop though, so we can't even begin to discuss it. In all three scenarios, the idea is to let such a concept play out. Rather than trying to discuss it's merits now, just let it happen, and we can make a better decision later.One technical point -- I don't think that Fedora rpm packaging is really the right technology for this. I don't think it scales to what we want. I don't know of any code-oriented packaging that would. Here are some of the limitations I see: * namespace: I package londonpictures. You also have pictures of london... what do you call your package? * repository size: How many individual photos are there on flikr? Potentially, we can have photo packages on that order of magnitude. * description and search: We're getting to the point where we have good searching via yum for packages. But how do we do the same thing for collections of photos? Let's say I want pictures of rubbish bins. How does that pull a single picture out of the londonpictures package?
Point taken. Can we agree this is just a technical issue though?
Is content useful? Yes, I think so. Should there be free software means of delivering content to others, yes I think so. Should there be a way to manage content on your computer? Yes, I think so. Is rpm packaging the right way to do that? No, I don't think so. Is the Fedora Project a venue where we can try to launch a free software means of doing this? I do think it fits in with our mission. I'm unsure of the overall benefit to our users (there *are* definite benefits in certain areas -- like being able to search Project Gutenberg, use a netbook like an ebook reader, have data for mapping software, etc) however, there might be other, distro neutral projects that we should work more closely with to achieve these goal -- for instance, partner with open street maps to let people upload and share mapping information there but provide a standard location for it to be on the filesystem, help code libraries and APIs to search and download them from the network to the local machine, and building desktop tools that use that information.
I'm thinking this might be a good candidate for a GSoC / Newcomer project. We can discuss it further, but if you find someone who's looking to become a new contributor somehow, i'm willing to mentor such an initiative. I think this goes beyond the scope of just creating another blessed third party repo but it's probably very useful in the end. -Yaakov
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