Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Kevin Kofler]

Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Application sandboxing/bundling is not mutually exclusive with a
> coherent system and with keeping control, it's just not an RPM as we
> know it. What we need to acknowledge is that delivering integral parts
> of the operating system and delivering third party apps are
> fundamentally two different things.

Big -1 to that!

The fact that we have no such artificial distinction has always been one of 
the biggest strengths of GNU/Linux.

> So once we have sandboxing we can (and should) propose an end user
> application delivery channel for those apps so we will keep control
> still. The key here is that the mechanisms to deliver an OS component
> and an end user should be different. The cadence _is_ different, as an
> example, at the LibreOffice team we have a hell of a time because people
> complain about bugs that we already fixed and released on an ongoing
> basis. In some cases, people are stuck with a specific version of Fedora
> and they simply can't get the latest version of a given app eventhough
> the new version doesn't require anything that is provided.

We should just push the new version as an update.

> The other problem is that the upstreams don't have a channel to deploy
> beta versions, or versions with a specific patch,

That's what testing repos (COPRs, repos.fedorapeople.org etc.) are for (see 
also kde-unstable and kde-testing for a working large-scale example).

> that you can't install concurrently because the distributions won't let
> you.

What's the point of letting them install concurrently? If you want to test a 
patch because the installed version doesn't work properly for you, you want 
to REPLACE the installed version with one that works for you. If it is 
actually worse, you can just yum downgrade/distro-sync to the official 
version.
 
        Kevin Kofler