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

[Fernando Nasser]

see in line

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 2:33:13 PM
> Subject: Re: What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?
> 
> 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.
> 

I don't think we can legally add it.  It must be added by the user
so those OCaml people go to jail, not us ;-)


> 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.
> 

Really?  If I add several yum repos in my tum.repo.d  the yum subcommands
operate over all those repos, son't they?  I am surprised by this statement.


> What happens if the OCaml team "goes rogue" and starts adding
> non-free
> packages? 

Their repo, their problem.

> 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.
> 

We should not even host their repo.  Anything that does not undergo 
Fedora's strict review process must be kept segregated IMHO.
disclaimer: IANAL

> 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.
> 

There is no problem here.  Whatever we need in core we need to add in 
there and build in there in our own ways and it becomes part of the
core and it is installed in the FHS proper places as usual.  We'll 
have to maintain these pieces (or convince some of the OCaml guys 
to do it under our rules in core).  The OCaml collection
(or collections!!!) will have theor own copy in /opt and out of
our ways.

Did I overlook anything here?



> Rich.
> 
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