Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2015-09-14 at 12:45 +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
> 
> and much more important:
> 
> if Fedora changes to more and more recommend "pip", "gem" and "cpan" 
> like installs instead RPM packages it is no longer a distribution
> over 
> the long because that would mean finally you have a core OS and
> handle 
> anything else like Microsoft or Apple - does anybody really want to
> go 
> that road?

I do. Yes. Or rather, I'd say we're already doing this, we're just not
clear that we *know* it.

Large numbers of users already deploy the software they actually
intend to use by methods other than the Fedora repositories.

For 'enthusiasts', haven't you seen all those 'what to do after you
install Fedora guides' which are basically 'install a bunch of stuff
from third party sources using these suspicious-looking scripts which
require root privileges'?

For admins, well, we've already covered the fact that the current
packaging requirements are fairly inimical to a lot of webapps, for
instance. As I've said, this is not some kind of airy-fairy
theoretical debate: what it means is that probably most people
deploying webapps on Fedora *aren't doing it via the packaging
system*. So this is another case of the major software deployment not
being done via the distribution packaging system.

And of course there is the brave new world of containers. There is
currently no 'official' way (so far as I'm aware) to deploy containers
on Fedora: absolutely everyone who's running Fedora as a container
host OS is working entirely outside the lines of the distribution-as-
software-provider.

So do we still believe we're not doing this already?

You might only use software packaged in Fedora. I might (well, nearly)
only use software packaged in Fedora. I don't think either of us is
likely the 'typical' use case any more.

The problem is that many our policies and ways of working are still
generally geared to the idea that this *is* the typical use case, so
we often don't have anything useful to say to people who are deploying
software outside of the repository system besides "why are you doing
that? Don't do that!", which isn't really constructive any more.
Things like COPR are honourable exceptions, but we really need more
than that. The 'everything comes from the repositories' story is a
*nice* story, but it's no longer one we can sustainably tell to
everybody all the time.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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