Multilib Middle-Ground

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I'd like to think of distributions as having some editorial control over
> what they ship.  If someone writes crap you don't have to publish it. Or at
> least overlap old/new versions for a complete version run.

And a lot of the software in the open ecosystem is under heavy
development and do not need the backwards compatibility that you are
expressing a need for for your in-house code.  If we used editoral
control in an uninformed fashion to dictate the level of stagnation
you require..then we are most likely killing our ability to move the
open source stack forward aggressive...which I'll remind you is the
primary goal of this endeavor.

Can we make space for your needs? Maybe. But you or someone else who
also cares deeply about this level of backwards-compatibility will
have to do the work necessary to outline the roadmap.  I've laid out
exactly what I think the starting point would be for the process of
defining a development framework concept to be used inside the Fedora
project space.    But until we have a best-effort assessment as to
which upstream libraries can be relied on to do deal with backwards
compatibility in a mature way, we don't have a place to begin towards
making substantial headway.  Everything you want done..requires
additional manpower and effort. And unless you're prepared to dig in
and do some of the work...as the person who cares deeply about
this...none of its going to get done.

-jef