Inter-WG coordination: Stable application runtimes

[Miloslav Trmač]

Hello,
Looking at the current WG outputs, it seems that nobody is taking on
the problem of stable application runtimes:

Primary requirement
===================
If all Fedora Products are released at a fairly fast cadence, and with
a fairly short support cycle, how do I write, deploy and run an
application so that it can be used 3-5 (or more) years into the future
with no or minimal changes, without running an unsupported Fedora
Product?


This is particularly important for the Server, which expects to be
kept installed without major disruptions for a fairly long time (even
if updating ot newer releases of Server), but it does also apply to
running applications via Cloud.

This includes custom applications that are not (or even can not) be
packaged in Fedora, and even if they were packaged in Fedora, we would
still want the effort to just keep them running to be minimal.

The requirement not to run an unsupported Fedora Product excludes
solutions like keeping an older version of Fedora running in a VM.


Possible secondary requirements
================================
1. It seems natural that the mechanism used for this should be the
same between Server and Cloud at least, so that the user can take the
exact same packaging of an application and deploy it on either.

2. There are many languages, even more sets of "middleware"/"platform
libraries" (Boost vs. Qt vs glib, Django vs. Turbogears vs. Zope), and
many ways to write an application.  It would be nice if the mechanism
used were the same for C/C++, Python, Ruby, Java, and anything else
you can think of.

3. In addition to allowing an "old" application to run on a newer
Fedora release, if we ever ship a Fedora product with a longer support
lifecycle, we'll be faced with the mirror of this problem: how to
allow running a "new" application on an "old" Fedora installation?
Both might be solvable with the same mechanism.

4. As an addition to 1., it "seems natural" that it should be possible
to develop applications for Server and Cloud using Workstation, i.e.
that the same stable runtimes should be available on a Workstation and
usable for application development (ideally without requiring root
access to use the runtime).


Solutions?
==========
Is anything being already done for this?  SCLs are working their way
through the FPC, but they haven't been so far an explicit part of
Fedora design/strategy (and some suggestions to move them to coprs go
even further in that direction).

Regardless of whether there is a specific technical solution or
whether it is being worked on, who "owns" this problem?
a) Do we all agree that we need to solve this?
b) Which WG will take on the task of solving this?  We shouldn't end
up with everybody agreeing that this needs to be solved, but no PRD
proposing to solve this.  Is it the Base WG or the Env and Stacks WG?
Or is it up to Server and Cloud to do it?

(I'm afraid this conversation should probably have started earlier.)
    Mirek