Fedora board vote and way forward

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 14:03 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>
>> > 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?
>
> Like I said I don't view the degree of isolation of the platform from
> the distro as a hugely key issue, and it's something we could figure out
> later, but I guess my personal answer would probably be 'yes, as long as
> it was sufficiently clear what was going on'. We already have various
> mechanisms like this in the distro, so it'd be kind of inconsistent to
> zap it for this purpose - though I think all the similar mechanisms that
> are currently allowed (I'm thinking of pip / rubygems / Wordpress plugin
> store and similar things) are for access to 'repositories' that have
> similar freedom / patent encumbrance policies to ours, which is kind of
> a notable difference.

I understand the preference for one nice, consistent location and I
agree it would be nice.  But so as to be clear, the real key
differences you see here are:

"as long as it was sufficiently clear what was going on"

and

"existing mechanisms have similar policies to Fedora's".

Is that correct?

If so, the existing scattered but specific repos could still have it
be clear as to what was going on, and we don't really control the
pip/rubygems/wordpress policies.  Those mechanisms could include
something Fedora considers unacceptable, and we likely wouldn't even
know.  Would we then patch out that functionality from their
respective languages if we found out?

I'm not trying to argue.  I don't even think I really disagree with
the sentiment you're trying to convey.  I'm trying to understand where
your bright line is though, because it's very dim to me at the moment.

josh