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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 03:30:32PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 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.

I agree completely.  It seems to me the software collections stuff is
all about RHEL, and almost nothing to do with Fedora (what important
platform comes out more often than once every 6 months???)

If Puppet and Rails can't be installed in Fedora, that's because
Puppet and Rails are buggy and/or their upstream processes are broken,
and we should work with upstream on fixing their bugs or their
processes.  Upstream first, right?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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