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

[Jan Zelený]

On 6. 12. 2012 at 10:50:03, Mark Bidewell wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com>wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-12-06 at 15:30 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > > IMHO use of software collections is a symptom of a badly run
> > > organisation
> > > not devoting enough cycles to maintain the software it uses, and hoping
> > > (as in wishful thinking) no problem will go critical before the product
> > > they built on top of those collections is end-of-lifed
> > > 
> > > I completely fail to see how entities with that problem will manage to
> > > maintain the package number explosion creating software collections will
> > > induce.
> > 
> > On the one hand, I agree completely - I think the 'share all
> > dependencies dynamically' model that Linux distros have traditionally
> > embraced is the right one, and that we're a strong vector for spreading
> > the gospel when it comes to that model, and it'd be a shame to
> > compromise that.
> > 
> > On the other hand, we've been proselytizing the Java heretics for over a
> > decade now, and the Ruby ones for a while, and neither shows any signs
> > of conversion or just plain going away, so we may have to call it an
> > ecumenical matter and deal with their models somehow. Sucky as it may
> > be. I don't know, I'm a bit conflicted.
> > --
> > Adam Williamson
> > Fedora QA Community Monkey
> > IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
> > http://www.happyassassin.net
> > 
> > --
> > devel mailing list
> > devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
> 
> I used to use Fedora as my primary OS (Now I use a Mac).  The major issue
> which drove me away and which I believe SC would help to solve is that with
> the current dependency model is that it becomes I want a new version of
> Libreoffice so now I have to upgrade my entire system from the Kernel on up
> (and by upgrade I mean clean install) to avoid issues.  SC would help
> decouple system and userland apps which would do wonders for usability.

Well, not exactly, you would still need to upgrade all packages that the new 
version of Libreoffice depends on and all packages these updated packages depend 
on and so on ... The only difference is that these updated packages would need 
to be a part of the collection while keeping the rest of the system intact. 
However the maintenance burden would be even higher, as maintainers would need 
to take care of multiple versions of packages in each Fedora.

Bottom line, the final effect for user wouldn't be much different from current 
state of things (in fact it might get even more complicated by the non-trivial 
way how programs in collections are executed). Therefore this isn't exactly 
the use case SCLs try solve.

-- 
Thank you
Jan Zeleny

Red Hat Software Engineer
Brno, Czech Republic
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20121206/96f06655/attachment-0001.sig>