Fedora board vote and way forward

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 3:05 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.

I see.  So you install "AppStore" from some website, and then open
that up and it has whatever.  OK, that's a bit different than what I
thought you were describing.  Thanks, that helps me understand where
you're coming from better.

> 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.

They'll likely still blame Fedora for having deficient driver support
our media codecs, but sure ;).  (Games are a horrible example, but I'm
just having fun there not seriously debating.)

> 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.

OK.

josh