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

[Subhendu Ghosh]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 3) It's the ecosystem. If using Software Collections on RHEL is good for
>    your company, it's good for it to work on Fedora, because a) we're the
>    upstream and problems get worked out here, b) development resources
>    benefit Fedora rather than being "spent" in a pocket universe, and c)
>    Software Collections which work across the whole ecosystem in a
>    consistent way make us a stronger choice for development work which may
>    eventually end up on Enterprise Linux in production.

To echo on the ecosystem comment.

There are things "inside", "on top", "alongside" or "under" a distribution.
Fedora takes the view that everything inside should be consistent
without redundancy.
This is extremely useful and important.

But Fedora does not have a policy for the other elements - what should
be on top, how should it be on top for example.

A while back Fedora started the ISV SIG and Greg had a beautiful blog
post [1] on why that initiative failed.
It failed because the communication to the ISVs was that they should
be inside Fedora and what they wanted
to be is on top of Fedora.

Software Collections is hope of creating a distinction between the
distribution and all that it contains, and an ability
for 3rd parties to to create their own world on top.

This always brings back the question of "what is Fedora" - folks think
I am making snide remarks when I use that phrase - but the question in
implicit in some of the discussion in this thread.

1 - Fedora is the linux software distribution
2 - Fedora is the community infrastructure that enables a linux
distribution and an ecosystem.

The two statements are quite different in their impact.


[1] http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/why-the-fedora-isv-sig-never-caught-fire/