Fedora board vote and way forward

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at 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