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

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 04:30:32PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
>> > Whenever I go to a tech meetup or talk to someone from a new startup
>> > company, their developers are inevitably using a different (usually
>> > proprietary) desktop OS, plus a non-Fedora distribution on their code.
>> > We're being left behind and left out. It doesn't matter how
>> > theoretically great we are if we end up with no users.
>> How does the proposal actually improve this?  Giving various SIGs more
>> freedom to manage various stacks makes neither the core nor the stacks
>> automatically any more attractive to anyone.  (Even allowing stacks to
>> evolve separately from the core and more in tune with upstream
>> releases doesn't make the Fedora version of the stack automatically
>> any more attractive than just installing the upstream version in the
>> way upstream documents.)
>
> It doesn't make it automatically more attractive, but from the feedback I've
> gotten so far, the general idea _does_ make it more attractive overall.

I know I might be asking a lot, but could you expand on what exactly
is more attractive?


> And, if the answer is that Fedora ends up being a great place to install the
> upstream version in the way upstream documents, is that really a problem?

Turning Fedora into a something close to a Linux from Scratch, yes,
that's kind of a problem to the historical identity of the project.
RPM has been the cornerstone and most contributors have, supposedly,
bought into the idea that using RPM is a fundamentally better way to
manage installation and management of Open Source software than
tarballs or (make install), so a turnaround to follow the exactly
opposite philosophy would be, at the very least, surprising.  (That's
not to say impossible, or even automatically unreasonable given some
set of circumstances.)
    Mirek