On 06/12/2022 20:21, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2022 at 2:01 PM Stephen Smoogen <ssmoogen@redhat.com> wrote:
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>> I think he would be happy with the policy spelled out in any form. Something like:
>>
>> While the Fedora Project is the upstream of CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it does not give any guarantees of its releases being compatible with either. Software built in either may not work due to missing dependencies, changes in kernel, compile time or library options, or similar issues.
> Ah! Yes, making that clear would be good.
As a guideline that sound a bit woolly to me and doesn't sound useful to
maintainers. As an rough idea either:
While the Fedora Project is the upstream of CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux it does not attempt to provide any compatibility with any major current and past versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (currently 7, 8, 9) or any other Linux distribution. Software binaries built for these generic systems may or may not work.
or
The Fedora project attempts to provide a small degree of binary program compatibility by means of compat libraries for the major current and past versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (currently 7, 8, 9) and the past 2 releases of Fedora only for reasonably some well used (by means of user feed back) external/commercial applications for 2 years after their publication date where this is easy of achieve as simple compat shared library additions and the maintainers of the required packages are willing to provide such packages.
That's probably a bit much for some, but some watered down derivative :)
Having a degree of binary compatibility aids external/commercial producers and makes Fedora more useful to more people.
Just my view.
The first would be more likely to be accepted over the second. The second requires packagers to actually test binaries from these other operating systems, and that is extra work for volunteers.
Fedora is a stone soup project. If people want software to be in the operating system, they have to bring it and keep it working themselves. Once it is in, people will try to help out when they can, but time resources to use stuff outside of what they normally do is usually not wanted. There are probably 8 people who are paid to work 'full-time' on Fedora, and most of their work is just keeping the build systems going. Everyone else is a volunteer or paid to work on it after everything else they have done is finished.
Actually is there some mechanism that Fedora could work out how many are using compat RPM's ?
I guess this would require some system used by mirrors that would report back number of downloads of each package. Obviously this wouldn't get everything (we have a cache of packages that we user across systems to reduce downloads across the Internet), but might give some metrics to automate such things.
No, there is no method to see what software is installed or used on workstation systems. The community has been overall very adverse to wanting that, and when we had some software which did act as a 'this is what is used' actively filled its database full of crap data. Attempts to add things like 'popcorn' and such usually end with long legal discussions and promises to revisit filling out crap data.