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

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 07:33:13PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> What I'm confused about is how this would work in terms of Fedora
> policy (not in terms of the software).

Yes, that's important to cover too.

> 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.

I think that there are significant advantages into having these teams be
under the Fedora umbrella, even if their collection is not part of core. In
order to be included, collections would agree to certain rules, including an
overall packaging policy. It may be that we'd have a "menu" of options for
maintenance lifetime and etc., or we might leave that up to each SIG as long
as they make it clear.

If a particular group wanted to go beyond what we set as the rules for
software collections in the distribution as a whole, they'd do it as an
indpeendent project.


> 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.

Maybe more awkward, but hopefully the tools could be improved so that's not
the case. If it's "pretty much the same" but offers the advantages of
decoupling the base from stack versions, that sounds great to me. 


> What happens if the OCaml team "goes rogue" and starts adding non-free
> packages?  Could Fedora be accused of contributory infringement for

The same as now. If the group wants to be part of Fedora, they follow the
Fedora rules.

> 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.

Yes.

> 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.

We can have "system ocaml". I see this as particularly useful for, say,
increased dependence on ruby-based config systems like Puppet. The system
stack would be the version needed to make that work, and we wouldn't need to
worry about the implications for users of the same software stack for
non-system programs -- that is, developers and users building on Fedora.
Same applies to Python and whatever else.


-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>