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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 01:02:41PM -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> I'd love LSB to matter more. But I didn't raise that can of worms
> intentionally :) To drill down to a single point though, as I said
> above, I don't want the distro to ship every piece of software I might
> use. Today, there is too much of a focus on doing it that way where I
> think there would be more value (to those who use third party software
> or who are pondering downstream consumers of Fedora also) in having a
> smaller core and treating everything that comes on top equally.

What I'm confused about is how this would work in terms of Fedora
policy (not in terms of the software).

Let's say that we decided that OCaml was non-core.  It would be in a
collection, and there'd be an OCaml repo, OCaml maintainer team, OCaml
packaging policy and so on.

Should Fedora add this repo automatically to make it easier to pull in
packages?  If it does that, then OCaml is really part of Fedora as far
as I can see, pretty much the same as now but a bit more awkward.

So let's say the user has to add the OCaml repo themselves.  That's
difficult for the user because lots of tools like "yum search" no
longer work well.

What happens if the OCaml team "goes rogue" and starts adding non-free
packages?  Could Fedora be accused of contributory infringement for
even pointing to the location of this repo?  Again, if Fedora accepts
detailed oversight over what goes into these external repos, then
AFAICS they might as well just be in Fedora in the first place.

What happens if a core program needs an OCaml program to build?  Or
needs to Require on one?  Or (in Debian terms) could be enhanced by
one?  I guess this means that everything in "Fedora New Core" would
need to be written in C and perhaps Python, and can only depend on a
handful of features, and that's rather limiting for everyone.

Rich.

-- 
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