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

[Jon Masters]

On 12/07/2012 12:30 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 10:40:13AM -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
>>> We could draw them between Core and Extras!
>> :) Note that just because we got rid of Core doesn't mean that it was a
>> bad idea. Ubuntu even adopted a "Core" of their own a while back. Maybe
> 
> The bad idea was the insider-vs-outsider mentality inherent in the way the
> split was made. I don't think anyone wants to go back to that, and, the
> above joke aside, I think it's clear that we wouldn't draw the line in the
> same way, and we would *definitely* have different rules than in those days.

Sure. Slight caveat that I do prefer Enterprise-leaning inspiration
everything ;) but I don't want a return to inside-vs-outside either.

> To a lot of people who weren't so close to all that, the name "Fedora Core"
> still has good connotations -- I still often meet people who refer to Fedora
> as that. I don't know what the balance in the community now is of people who
> have that kind of rosy-eyed fondness, people who are new and don't have a
> history either way, and people who remember the Dark Times and would be put
> off by the name.

Hey, it's still "fc18" (for various RPM versioning reasons) :)

>> they'll have the same experience we had and get away from that, or maybe
>> Linux distributions should ultimately not be in the business of
>> providing all+kitchen sink. Speaking only personally, what I want is a
>> stable core platform of very limited size against which I can install
>> other packages and stacks.
> 
> I think we *could* have both. There's no reason that Fedora couldn't make
> that stable core platform *and* provide layers above it. In fact, referring
> to
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview?rd=FedoraProject:About#Our_Mission
> it seems pretty clear that both levels are in scope.

Sure we could. There's nothing to prevent a company or an organization
from shipping an OS as well as software that installs upon it. Plenty
do. But it's when one gets in the business of shoving in the kitchen
sink and believing that everything must be provided in the "one true
repo" that the problem comes. I want to be able to get packaged third
party software for distros like Fedora more easily. If there's an
expectation that some kind of platform compatibility has to exist, we
might even see that happen. I was encouraged last night that the latest
Altera design tools work on Fedora 17 with only one "compat" library
being installed, but I've been far less lucky with other stuff.

Jon.