Summary/Minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2012-12-19)

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-12-20 at 18:48 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 06:07:58PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-12-20 at 17:50 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > 
> > > > Just making systemd the exception sounds like chickening out from the
> > > > real solution which is to end this Fedoraism.
> > > > 
> > > Well really it's us not wanting to fight to make you do the right thing any
> > > longer.  If you want us to take a stand please continue to talk about your
> > > way being the one and only right way until someone's heroic enough to stand
> > > up to your attitude.
> > 
> > Ahem. Isn't your own first sentence suggesting that *your* way is the
> > one and only right way? I don't see how you can attack Lennart for
> > having a firm belief about what's the 'right way' when you also seem to
> > have a firm belief about what's the 'right way'...
> > 
> The FPC Guidelines give package maintainers the option of using
> %{_libexecdir}, %{_libdir}.  The recent changes that I worked on allow
> %{_prefix}/lib in certain cases.  When FPC at large decided that portions of
> what systemd wanted to do still didn't completely fall under those cases,
> I took the request from FPC that FESCo simply grant a special exception for
> systemd to FESCo.
> 
> So if you're arguing that my firm belief is also a right way or the highway,
> belief then you aren't arguing about the use of lib, libexec, and lib64
> anymore.  You're opening up a much larger conversation about whether
> top-down or bottom-up decision making is the direction that Fedora should be
> taking in the future; whether Fedora "management" should decide on one and
> only one way to do things and then force every packager to do things that
> way.
> 
> But if you want to go that route on this question, then it should be noted
> that FPC ruled that the use that systemd makes of
> %{_prefix}/lib was wrong under the prior guidelines but the systemd
> maintainers refused to make their package conform.  So while you might pose
> that question it's not likely to have a more desirable outcome for the
> systemd package maintainers than what they have now.

It seemed perfectly clear from context that what Lennart was arguing is
that the guidelines should be changed and we should stop using
this /usr/libexec directory which no-one outside of RH-derived distros
has adopted, and which is thus a barrier to cross-distro operation of
projects like systemd.

It doesn't seem like an optimal situation if Fedora's guidelines require
systemd to do something which doesn't make sense on other systemd-based
distros at all.

A systemd-specific exception works for systemd, fine, but it doesn't
really seem to address the root problem.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net