Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 21:03 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Am 04.11.2013 20:56, schrieb drago01:
> >> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 8:49 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
> >>> that's all true but you can be pretty sure if a "app-store" with
> >>> bundeled applications exists *nobody* would package and maintain
> >>> them as RPM -> everybody would point with his finger to the app
> >>
> >> No because RPM packages apps *do* have benifits .. otherwise we
> >> wouldn't have this discussion.
> >>
> >>> if it goes in that direction, and it starts faster than anybody likes
> >>> you do a dramatical harm to the userbase which likes the consistent
> >>> package managment and *really used* conecpt of shared libraries
> >>
> >> Again those are NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. You can have sandboxed *and*
> >> rpm packaged apps at the same time.
> >
> > the most imporant word in your answer is *CAN*
> >
> > but you will not, nobody will package whatever application
> > as RPM if he is fine with the app-store, so you *could*
> > have both but i doubt at the end of the day it will happen
> 
> And I disagree ... but there is a way to find out ... lets try and see ;)

That's rather a cavalier attitude. 

You seem to agree that the future Harald posits is at least a
possibility. If so, I think you, he and I would all agree it would be a
negative outcome in at least some respects. It is, therefore, a future
risk. It's not an easily reversible risk: we can't invent a sandboxed
app distribution mechanism, promote it as a blessed and 'supported'
method of app distribution for Fedora, and then suddenly say 'hey, wait,
that was a bad idea!' and take it away again. Or, rather, we could, but
that path would have its own negative consequences.

So: you, he and I all agree that the path your propose implies a risk.
You would also argue, I'm sure, that it may result in a benefit.

In this situation what we should do is carefully consider the relative
possibilities of the good, bad and mixed outcomes with as much precision
as we can, and try to come up with a path forward which makes the
likelihood of a good outcome as high as possible and the likelihood of a
bad outcome as low as possible. "Let's just try it and see what
happens!" is not a mature approach to risk management.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net