Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 11/04/2013 01:54 PM, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 12:56 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 06:39:54PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>>> The reason we are so strongly opposed to app stores is that we
>>> are fairly convinced that the mere fact of having them
>>> available WILL: * reduce the number of applications actually
>>> available in our repositories (because some upstreams will just
>>> upload a bundle and tell you to use that, and nobody will want
>>> to do the work of actually getting the package through Fedora
>>> review),
>> 
>> If they're easily available to our users, and work just as nicely
>> or better, why is this a problem? In fact, it kind of sounds like
>> "everyone wins!" to me.
> 
> Indeed, this is a relief to the distro community, suddenly you
> don't have the burden of maintaining all these apps in your system
> image, avoiding any potential problems on upgrades.
> 
> It also removes the pressure for the user to have to upgrade
> his/her whole system just because they want the latest version of
> an app.
> 

Alternately, it avoids forcing unstable backports of applications into
the older releases.


> It also allows for parallel versions of an app, which means that to
> test a beta version of, say,  LibreOffice, you don't need the beta
> version of your whole operating system.
> 


This seems a little bit of a thin justification, but if we're getting
it for free alongside the other features... hooray?


> And the application developer suddenly gains back control on how
> and when his app gets delivered to users.
> 
> The only downside is that we are going to have to rewire our brains
> to stop using yum/dnf to browse/install/remove end user desktop
> apps. (This, I think, is why this idea gets so much pushback from
> the distro communities)


That's not necessarily true. It's entirely plausible that we could
integrate these two approaches simply by creating an RPM wrapper that
would pull down the appropriate application object (whatever that
format happens to be).


> 
> And, by the way, we've been supporting this kind of model with pip
> and gem already, so I really don't get why all the fuss when
> suddenly we want to do it with the desktop applications.
> 

Please don't use pip and gem as "positive" examples... they have a
habit of conflicting with the installed system that is an additional
problem we may hope to solve with this.
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