Darktable Copr

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Wed, 2015-09-09 at 19:06 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-09-09 at 18:33 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > However, it is unclear to me 1) what you mean by mandate, and 2)
> > how
> > you plan on doing so at a Fedora Project level particularly when
> > the
> > project has not committed to shipping any kind of xdg-app at all. 
> >  I
> > believe the desire and intentions are there, but mandate seems a
> > bit
> > bold at this point.
> 
> In the Workstation WG, there is consensus on moving towards
> distributing applications as xdg-app bundles. Applications will be
> required to bundle any library not provided by the xdg-app runtime. I
> don't think we have made any formal decisions regarding this, but it
> seems almost inevitable at this point. We also haven't defined what
> applications will be required to use xdg-app, but history tells us
> that
> if the answer isn't "almost everything," the project will fail. An
> optional application sandbox is a pointless application sandbox;
> developers aren't going to use it if it's optional, since that's more
> work for them.
> 
> > Yes, Coprs are being used to provide useful software outside of the
> > Fedora repositories.  This is not surprising at all.  What would be
> > the good of building the Copr infrastructure if it wasn't used?  I
> > also don't think it is all that much of a problem either.
> 
> I don't really understand what the end goal is with coprs, I suppose,
> and I'm not sure if the copr developers or anyone else does either.
> There's really no practical difference to the end user whether the
> application is in Fedora or a copr, so long as it appears in GNOME
> Software. But if the packaging guidelines can be circumvented simply
> by
> migrating applications to a copr, then applications are going to
> migrate to coprs. Eventually we're going to have a lot fewer
> applications in the Fedora repositories. This isn't necessarily a bad
> thing, but I don't really see why it's desirable....
> 

So, one of the major pieces of the Fedora.next design philosophy was
this: we have never had a good differentiation between what it means
to be "in" Fedora vs. "on" Fedora. The packaging guidelines are just
about perfect for describing how best to build a *platform* ("in"
Fedora) but are a very high bar for attempting to build *applications*
("on" Fedora).

One of the original proposals in this space was to have "rings" of
policy, wherein the further out you get from the core of Fedora, the
less restrictive the policy could be. COPRs is one output from that,
being the "furthest ring". You can put anything in a COPR that is
legally distributable and package it however you want.

One step in from that are the curated COPR repos. Specifically, those
applications that are self-contained within their repository and do
not alter any part of the platform. This is a good place to put
software like Chromium, PyCharm or Darktable. Packages that aren't
going to meet our strict guidelines (and don't really need to in order
to be useful). In general, we'd want keep this to a small list of
upstreams that are reasonably good at keeping themselves patched for
security bugs, of course.

I think we need to come up with a better term to use for these
specific repositories. They come *from* the COPR system, but they are
closer to being "official" Fedora than others.

I hope this helps explain the rationale here.
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