Fedora board vote and way forward

[Bastien Nocera]

----- Original Message -----
> My take away from the discussion so far is that the current board would not
> accept
> anything that 'automates' access to such external software. Doesn't matter if
> we ship
> the metadata on the ISO or not.
> 
> The only thing that I can see flying with the current board is a system that
> is 'blind' to what it is offering, just like
> a web browser.

How is that a better solution than making it easier to add new repositories through
the web browser? Or through a URL copy/paste in the software center?

My naive approach would be to:
- allow repositories to be defined by a single URL (this is what third-party repositories
  for Synology, iOS jailbreak, Cyanogen, etc. use)
- use a custom scheme in the software center to pass those URLs, eg.
    gnome-software://rpmrepos.org/my-stable-repo
  or even defining multiple repos with a single URL:
    gnome-software://rpmrepos.org
  The software center can now show you the list of repositories offered by this URL
- Convince repo maintainers to add those URLs to web pages

One-click in the web browser, confirm in Software center. It also works for both
proprietary repos and free software restricted ones. The user can find out about the
repos through the existing page, that could be linked from the Software center as well:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories

Having said that, I don't think this is the blocker problem for most users. They know how
to find the repositories they need ("fedora rpm nvidia" in Google?), the problem is
providing making it easy for developers to package their wares for Fedora.

Have you recently tried to install Skype or Spotify on a Fedora machine? It's all about
running alien (in the same way that Debian users ran alien 10 years ago to convert
proprietary RPMs to debs).

Hashing out application bundles and making sure that whatever gets selected also works
on Ubuntu would be the best way to convince the makers of those products to ship them
in a format that Fedora can understand and install.