add a special Provides: to all login manager packages

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Colin Walters wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 2009-02-18 at 17:14:12 -0500, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
>>> The other thing to we should do is to strongly discourage people from
>>> adding more of them to Fedora.  There's not a really good reason for
>>> anything other than gdm and kdm to be included and supported.
>> I'm not sure I buy this argument. Who gets to say what use cases are
>> interesting to the Fedora Community? What if the next great window
>> manager isn't GNOME or KDE?
> 
> I very strongly believe that something like Fedora can't be an
> abstract project to put as many different pieces of software into RPM
> form as possible, regardless of what kind of software it is and the
> ramifications for the layers involved.  Instead, it should be focused
> on a product or goal - desktop and server images being good choices.
> And the question is how does the work involved impact those products.
> 
On the contrary, I believe that we'd be cutting off the lifeblood of
Fedora to make it focus on a few distinct products.  Fedora derives its
contributor base from the fact that there are many people who are each
willing and enthusiastic about working on different things.  As much as
possible, we should be attempting to get these people to interact and
work on their projects inside of Fedora even when the goals conflict
with each other.

That's not to say there shouldn't be groups within Fedora focused on
making a product out of the mixture of different individual and
micro-project goals.  The Fedora release is a focal point for our
energies that gives a time frame and structure to our individual tasks.
 But making the whole Project conform to the goal of producing a Desktop
Spin and a Server Spin is missing out on Fedora's strength.  Fedora
needs to be more than the release.  It needs to be about building up a
community of developers who can, at least tolerate each other and work
on ways to make their different goals and visions cohabit under the
Fedora umbrella.

Getting too focused on Fedora, the distribution, means that we might
have a superior Desktop experience or a superior Server OS but it
doesn't mean that we'll have a rich base of contributors who are willing
to build new and imperfect software to replace the old and imperfect
software that we currently run.  It doesn't mean that we'll continue to
be innovative or willing to be on the cutting edge.  It doesn't mean
that we'll be able to attract a large and diverse group of active
contributors.

Software becomes quickly dated; progress marches on.  In twenty years, I
don't want to be part the team that created a Linux distribution back in
the noughts;  I want to be one of the members of the group that have
used their experiences to make each other better problem solvers,
programmers, and system admins that can get good results even when we're
put in charge of the local herd of cats.

-Toshio