freedesktop specs

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller wrote:

> > IMO, all of the changes we make have to be send upstream anyway
> regardless of
> > how minor it is. There is no particular reason a better logo shouldn't be
> > upstream to use your example.
>
> You say that, but Jakub Steiner tried to submit a much improved icon to
> the Darktable
> project not long ago and it got rejected with the suggestion that if we
> didn't
> want the current icon we should just patch it ourselves in Fedora :)
>

Sure. I didn't want to get into all the possible scenarios here but we
should always offer patches to upstream, no matter how minor they are.  I
try to go as far as reporting permission issues, empty files etc just
because I think that is the right approach as outlined in
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_projects and
endorsed by FESCo etc.  That doesn't mean all our patches will be
accepted.  For practically all major changes, some patches will end up
being carried downstream even for security issues.

My point was merely that considering that as our default mode of working,
we are not advocating for forking just because we say that we will enforce
a specific number of specs from freedesktop.org whatever they might be.

>I would be fine with that, but mostly because the likelyhood of anyone even

> considering adding such an app to the default installation is extremely
> low.
> The goal here is to not include as little as possible with the default set
> and
> instead rely on Software to be the portal to applications.
>

Agreed with the general idea of keeping the number of pre-installed
components to a smaller set but there are some very high profile
applications/components already included that don't follow the xdg base dir
spec for example (firefox, nss, java etc) and by specifying that we are
going to atleast except that any software components included by default
follow the specs, we get to a more clearer definition of what we consider
"high quality".  If I am a software developer developing something for
Fedora workstation, I would also gain a clearer understanding of the
expectations involved.

In the case of xdg base dir spec, it serves a functional purpose of making
backups easier and it isn't merely cosmetic.  From a somewhat selfish
perspective, I would also likely get less resistance upstream if a major
distribution like Fedora says "This is the minimum we expect for any
default components".

Rahul
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