What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 15:14 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On 5 December 2012 15:07, Simo Sorce <simo at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 16:10 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> >> On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 04:06:38PM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> >> > > 1) Fedora is big enough that we have concrete situations where one size
> >> > >    doesn't fit all. Puppet being broken on F17 (and probably F18 as well)
> >> > >    is a fine example of something within the distro itself. And, as a
> >> > >    platform for development, offering more version choices to our users
> >> > >    would be a strength.
> >> > <heretical>
> >> > Well, then maybe Fedora's too big, and we should move to a model where
> >> > Fedora is much smaller, and the grand Fedora universe contains things that
> >> > are packaged *for* one or multiple Fedoras.
> >> > </heretical>
> >>
> >> I have a cautious leaning in favor of this heresy. (*Looks around for angry
> >> villagers with torches*.) It seems like (eventually) the Software
> >> Collections mechanism might provide part of the infrastructure for doing
> >> that cleanly.
> >
> > Isn't the risk that things will get more broken in collections, due to
> > dependencies not being anymore strictly checked in a single repository
> > and general disconnection between the 'main' repo and the specific
> > collection ?
> 
> I would expect any sort of Software Collections would be a large
> Installer Beware item where Fedora does not guarantee anything (it
> works, it will have security fixes, it doesn't break other stuff) and
> it is between the Installer and the SC group that made the "bundle" to
> deal with those issues.

You still need to keep multiple versions of RPMs in the core repo.
Otherwise Collections may simply not be installable from scratch at all
if any of their package depends strictly on a slightly older version
than the bleeding edge.
Incidentally keeping multiple version would also allow more graceful
downgrades when needed, instead of forcing people to go to koji to
download the older version because it disappeared from repos.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York