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

[Nicolas Mailhot]

IMHO use of software collections is a symptom of a badly run organisation
not devoting enough cycles to maintain the software it uses, and hoping
(as in wishful thinking) no problem will go critical before the product
they built on top of those collections is end-of-lifed

I completely fail to see how entities with that problem will manage to
maintain the package number explosion creating software collections will
induce.

I think those people only like software collections as long as they are
not held accountable about the (security…) state those collections are in,
either because someone else bears the burden of maintaining them (typical
case in a software shop where a sysadmin got tasked with collecting the
bits developers code against, and then gets forbidden to update them to
avoid some work for those developers), or because no one is looking
closely at the sorry state the software collections are left in.

The long term effect of software collections is to make whatever is built
on them irrelevant, as the more you procrastinate about updating, the more
work it is to update, till updating becomes totally out-of-the-question
and everyone accepts your product is going to the toilet with the bricks
it has been built on the day they finally irredeemably break. IE kleenex
programming (Oracle has perfected this strategy: their J2EE products
quality is often abysmal, but they only need to survive long enough to
rack in the money needed to buy a better competitor the day those products
find no new buyers).

Do we really want to go this way at the Fedora level? Our angle was more
to enable a sustainable software ecosystem, that didn't need regular cash
infusions to replace applications that became irrelevant due to lack of
maintenance.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot