On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com> wrote:
The practical suggestion I find most interesting is a
*cross-distribution* infrastructure/platform for the provision and
distribution of third-party software, quite simply. My take is that the
fact there's nothing like this that all or at least most of the major
vendors agree on is much more of a problem for both users and
distributors of third party stuff than any single distro's exact
perspective on how far it should isolate itself from third-party bits.
As we've already gone over, I don't think the degree of isolation from
third-party bits that Fedora currently insists on is so great as to form
a major barrier *in itself*.
<snip NVIDIA>
My point there is that we should probably think harder about the
Chrome/Flash/whatever case - the case of things that are basically
'apps' sitting quite lightly on top of the distribution 'platform' -
than the tricky NVIDIA case, which is kind of a special one and requires
special handling. For the 'app' case, I really think that having a
*single* distribution platform for all the major distros would make
everyone's life a lot easier, and would not be hard at all to reconcile
with Fedora's fundamental principles - we just have to isolate access to
that platform to whatever degree is agreed to meet our principles, and I
think we're all agreed that that degree doesn't need to be *excessively*
onerous, just enough to keep Fedora's principles clear and the
separation of responsibility clear.
Of course, this requires both building the infrastructure/framework and
the distributions committing to *some* kind of platform that the third
party distributors can rely on - even if it's as basic as 'we'll give
you glibc and an input layer and ALSA/PulseAudio and maybe we'll commit
to a couple of toolkits being available, anything else you can bundle
yourself or manage the cross-distro compatibility some other way'. But,
at least IMHO, that's the approach that provides the best payback. It's
already what happens, in effect - most third party distributors don't
build tweaked and tested packages for all distros, they just build a
huge static bundle on top of glibc and ship it in a tarball (or a 'dumb'
RPM/DEB package which doesn't really use any distro dependencies, it's
just being used as a container). But we don't have a nice neat
distribution platform for their tarballs/dumb RPM or DEB packages, so
users have to go out and find them in a dozen different locations, and
there's lots of silliness in how they work probably because all the
distros aren't getting together and providing some simple groundwork and
rules.
If we just had a nice Software/Steam-ish platform where you'd know all
the major third-party stuff was available, with a decent interface and
screenshots and reviews and all that gumph that's the current vogue,
it'd be a much nicer experience, even if ultimately what you got was the
same big static bundle you get from a tarball/dumb package today.
So if one were to go to all of the infrastructure work and
cross-distro collaboration and get vendor buy-in, would you view that
single "platform" (or AppStore or whatever) as something that a Fedora
software installer could point to and include in searches done in the
software installer?
josh