Fedora board vote and way forward

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 14:47 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 14:03 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> >
> >> > 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?
> >
> > Like I said I don't view the degree of isolation of the platform from
> > the distro as a hugely key issue, and it's something we could figure out
> > later, but I guess my personal answer would probably be 'yes, as long as
> > it was sufficiently clear what was going on'. We already have various
> > mechanisms like this in the distro, so it'd be kind of inconsistent to
> > zap it for this purpose - though I think all the similar mechanisms that
> > are currently allowed (I'm thinking of pip / rubygems / Wordpress plugin
> > store and similar things) are for access to 'repositories' that have
> > similar freedom / patent encumbrance policies to ours, which is kind of
> > a notable difference.
> 
> I understand the preference for one nice, consistent location and I
> agree it would be nice.  But so as to be clear, the real key
> differences you see here are:
> 
> "as long as it was sufficiently clear what was going on"
> 
> and
> 
> "existing mechanisms have similar policies to Fedora's".
> 
> Is that correct?

No, not entirely, because there's a significant difference in this
approach. You'd install the platform from Fedora's repos - which would
have the implication that we are responsible for the platform working on
Fedora, which seems like a reasonable commitment on our part - and you'd
then install the software from the platform.

When someone runs Steam on Fedora and then installs a game, it's pretty
clear that the game came from Steam, not Fedora. If it doesn't work,
they're probably not going to blame Fedora. If it's a non-free game,
it's fairly clear that doesn't mean Fedora endorses non-free software.

Ditto with the pip, gems etc examples - you install pip from Fedora, and
then you run 'pip install foo' (not 'yum install foo') to install foo.
It's embedded right there in the command that you're installing
something *from pip*, not from Fedora.

Any mechanism which results in the actual software being accessed
through the same interface as Fedora's own packages does not have this
clarity baked in, so it has to communicate it in some other way. Right
now the hoop-jumping you have to go through in order to enable an
external repo or install an external package *also* has the effect of
making this clear - I think that's one reason this debate is so fuzzy:
from one perspective the difficulty sucks, but from another perspective
it's performing a valuable function for us. I don't mind losing the
aspect that sucks, but I don't want to lose the valuable function.

> If so, the existing scattered but specific repos could still have it
> be clear as to what was going on, and we don't really control the
> pip/rubygems/wordpress policies.

I don't have sufficient background on this - I haven't read through the
fesco/board considerations of those mechanisms, if they were considered
- so I'm hesitant to debate it. But I suspect that if it suddenly became
the case that you could deploy non-free software through these
mechanisms, there'd at least be a question about whether we should
continue to provide them in the way we currently do.

> I'm not trying to argue.  I don't even think I really disagree with
> the sentiment you're trying to convey.  I'm trying to understand where
> your bright line is though, because it's very dim to me at the moment.

Sure, I understand where you're coming from - I think this is one of
those areas where everyone has a take on it that makes sense to them as
long as they don't examine it too closely, and everyone's take is
slightly different, and when we all start really examining our takes and
comparing them to each other and to what's actually there in the
software, everything gets squishier...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net