Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Nov 6 01:15:19 UTC 2013


On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 16:52 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 01:23:01PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > So let me step into my handy Tardis and bring back a vignette from the
> > Real World after Fedora and other distributions bless upstream app
> > distribution as a preferred channel:
> 
> I'm not sure I can match this for evocativeness, but:
> 
> > Manager: ...so, executive summary: you're saying you'd _like_ to spend a
> > not insubstantial chunk of your fairly expensive time working to jump
> > through some hoops so our Shiny New Application can be included in these
> > 'downstream distribution' things, but if I insist, you can whack a
> > button to put it in the Linux App Store and we can go to press with our
> > announcement tomorrow?
> > 
> > Well-Intentioned Techie A: (gulps)...yes.
> > 
> > Manager: Whack that button, techie. Whack it hard. Now get out of my
> > office, I have to call the PR department.
> 
> In a different future where there is no such magic button, what brings
> enlightenment to the manager? I think maybe the conversation goes much like
> yours, except with "and don't bother me about 'getting into downstream
> distributions' again".

There's two differences:

1) It's substantially easier for users to get your app from their distro
repos than from your own distribution system
2) It's probably rather more work for you to maintain your own
distribution system

To summarize it cynically - the comparative shittiness of current
third-party distribution methods (various podunk frameworks which don't
really work, non-repo packages, or the old
statically-compiled-binary-in-a-tarball being your only options) works
in favour of distro packaging.

Yes, in an ideal world (as I was saying) we could get everyone on board
with 'distro packaging is better than even a good third party
distribution framework once you get over the initial startup costs!'
even if we improve third party distribution, but in the _real_ world, it
may be the  case that once we make third party distribution X% more
convenient for both sides and X% more officially blessed by
distributions, suddenly no-one cares about distro packaging any more.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net



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