Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Le Mer 6 novembre 2013 19:24, Josh Boyer a écrit :
>
>> I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around the intense focus on a
>> new app packaging technology when the entire distro is making massive
>> changes to how it's produced.
>
> Because all distributions can and do ship the same software and the main
> thing that differences distributions is attention to packaging. What build
> the Fedora brand is in huge part the hard work of packagers over the years
> and careful definition of packaging guidelines.

I think you missed the point of my question.  It might have been too
subtle.  It wasn't "what is wrong with sandboxed/containerized apps?".
 See the follow ups.

> There have been many people that claimed this process was awful in the
> past and their alternatives all sank. Mainly because they were addressing
> developer problems (freedom to take all the shortcuts that make
> integration hard and users miserable) and thought they would win
> marketshare this way (hint: you do not win marketshare by solving
> developer problems you win marketshare by solving user problems. Users
> always voted with their feet and rejected the developer-friendly solutions
> that made their own life harder).

Users want apps.  Developers are increasingly not caring at all about
distros.  I think there's a middle ground to be had here.  As I've
said before, just saying this is bad without even thinking about if it
has some positives and how it could work just seems shortsighted.

> So what makes this initiative different? I guess that's because it
> promotes itself as making it possible to get software in Fedora, competing
> with and disparaging the work of packagers while hijacking the brand they
> helped building.
>
> Get this thing its own name. Let it win or lose user confidence on its own
> merit, and don't confuse users with "in Fedora" claims when you're
> absolutely *not* offering the same thing "in Fedora" means now.

And yet, now we have Coprs.  Which lets people easily upload
unreviewed, possibly bundled application SRPMs for easy distribution
outside of the main Fedora repos.  Everyone seems to think Coprs are
awesome, but they can be used for the same things you deride
containerized apps for.

> Right now this proposal has the potential to ruin user trust and become
> the same thorn nvidia drivers are for xorg and kernel people now. Of
> course people who build this trust do not like it.
>
> Is that clearer?

No.

josh