Josh Boyer (jwboyer@fedoraproject.org) said:
We are not, though. Modular Fedora, Atomic Fedora, and regular Fedora are all distinctly different platforms with different delivery mechanisms and core technologies. Unless you plan to take an axe to Modular and Atomic Fedora, we're providing multiple platforms.
Those are not platforms. Those are ways we compose Fedora, or artifacts of our release. The platform being defined is the set of services and APIs we provide to other things to consume. That is distinctly different than the artifacts they may choose to use.
E.g.:
- A time synchronization service and API is defined in the platform
- An implementation of that might be ntpd. Or chrony. Or some
systemd thing. As long as the API and service remains consistent, the platform is consistent.
- Modularity is a mechanism to define these services an APIs at a
higher level than per package. It lets us set the platform at "we provide a webserver", not "we provide apache and nginx and lighttpd. take your pick". You can still choose specific webservers, but the module definition for each will hopefully fulfill the platform API. That's one of the goals.
I think that might be the issue here - it's likely to be seen by most as a change in how we describe the platform that is delivered. For better or worse, even in the Atomic & Workstation & Spin & so on days, the Fedora 'platform' is likely seen as "a collection of packages, including three web servers, five desktops, and as many as twenty IRC clients".
I know the rings -> modularity -> ??? discussions are about changing this idea/perception, but as we've still only ever produced the same set of artifacts ('a big repo turned into images and isos and variant repos'), I don't know that the public perception has changed. We need to get everyone on the same page as to whether it's a bikeshed or woodshed before we can talk about what color it is.
Bill