supporting closed source operating systems?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 5:44 AM, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> There's no significant "useful-ness bar" to reach, other than a package
> probably needs to useful or interesting enough to catch someone's attention
> to complete a package review.

I believe Axel's question has a more subtle edge and would like to
think he  chose the word "promote" deliberately in his opening
sentence.

We "allow" pretty much anything appropriately licensed and legal to
distribute into the distro as a stand alone library or application.  I
don't think that is the question of merit.  The meater issue is this,
is it worth changing how we do things, how we package other
components, to make the minwg cross-compiler tool chain 'fit' into our
project development environment so that Fedora can build and ship
libraries/utilities/applications with this toolchain that are meant to
be run on Windows.  There's already technical discussion about how to
modify some existing development packages to make it possible for this
toolchain to exist.

Allowing the toolchain in and of itself I don't think is the issue.
But there are clearly intentions...motives....floating around to use
that toolchain on a Fedora system to build and distribute
libraries/utilities/applications..possibly as "official" Fedora
bits..though the last hasn't been communicated yet. The plan could be
to do all of the building strictly under the 'Red Hat' brand... with
no direct benefit for Fedora. But plans change. I'm using my crystal
ball a little bit here, and I believe that Axel is too.  'We' need to
know under what situations 'we' are okay with this possible future.
Is it okay if we structure our internal build and development
processes to make it possible to build and distribute binaries in our
infrastructure with this cross-compiler toolchain with the intention
to use the resulting binaries on Windows.

I know what I'm personally okay with "promoting" in that
regard...migration tools.  If we can build windows applications as
part of this project that helps people get a Fedora or other linux
install up and running, whether it be virtualized or not..then I'd
probably support it as an official piece of Fedora tech.


-jef