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

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 6, 2012 4:30:32 PM
> Subject: Re: What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?
> 
> 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 couldn't have said it better. :)

Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team

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