What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?

[Michael Ekstrand]

On 12/05/2012 03:06 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) said: 
>> Three things:
>>
>> 1) Fedora is big enough that we have concrete situations where one size
>>    doesn't fit all. Puppet being broken on F17 (and probably F18 as well)
>>    is a fine example of something within the distro itself. And, as a
>>    platform for development, offering more version choices to our users
>>    would be a strength.
> 
> <heretical>
> 
> Well, then maybe Fedora's too big, and we should move to a model where
> Fedora is much smaller, and the grand Fedora universe contains things that
> are packaged *for* one or multiple Fedoras.
> 
> </heretical>

FWIW (probably not much), I also think this is a great idea.  It feels
strange to me that the same thing contains & manages everything from
base system (e.g. kernel through core GNOME stack) and add-on apps (say
Battle for Wesnoth, to pick a relatively obvious example).

Now, there's a bike shed to be painted over where the lines should be drawn.

I wouldn't at all mind even seeing multiple packaging systems at work -
RPM manages the core system, and something like PC-BSD's PBIs used for
“applications”.

But it does seem unlikely to ever happen, at least in the context of an
existing distribution.

- Michael