RFC: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next" (draft of my Flock talk)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 10:43:36AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 03:14:04PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > I suspect this would be better if we made it much easier to automate
> > "cpan2spec"-style mass importing of packages to RPM.  So that, for
> > example, you didn't need to separately review every single perl-*
> > package that comes from CPAN, or every single rubygem.  
> 
> Yes, definitely an approach worth looking into.
> 
> >                                                         (The obvious
> > downside is that Fedora or Someone is going to be shipping an awful
> > lot of dodgy, insecure, illegally-licensed software because all the
> > checks we usually do to keep that out of the distro will be bypassed.)
> 
> Well, obviously Someone is doing that quite a lot anyway. Fedora needs to
> continue to avoid that. Here is where "work with upstream" comes in -- if we
> put the same effort into reviewing packages in Fedora into reviewing the
> same code at the _upstream_ packaging point, we significantly increase the
> amount of good our work is doing _and_ we can draw in a larger community of
> people interested in the same ends but not necessarily in Fedora or RPMs.

You don't necessarily need to distribute these RPMs.  You could have a
tool that takes the upstream sources, compiles it, turns it into an
RPM and installs that (all done on the end-user's machine).  Of
course, integrating that with yum is challenging; maybe a yum plugin
can do it?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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