Software management: Call for RFEs results!

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:04 AM, Jan Zelený <jzeleny at redhat.com> wrote:
> Ok then, talk to FPC about this. Personally I'd be against creating the wild
> west from Fedora itself and I'd rather like to have have it in COPRs. Fedora
> should keep its high standard of Software packaging (which usually doesn't
> apply for upstream packages).

Although I support the desire to have library versioning and package
versioning that makes sense, I'm not sure that just insisting that we
have the high standards and we are doing it right is enough.

We are _not_ doing it right.

We should have given Linux users an operating system that gives users
all of the major functionality in various ruby gems and Python modules
and ... _within our design with high standards_.  We haven't done so;
in fact if we look at the Linux API ("as opposed to the
language-specific APIs"), we can't claim any high standards: we
provide various C libraries with completely inconsistent APIs, and
various command-line tools with completely inconsistent interfaces,
and the like.  If you don't look only at the packaging, most of the
language-specific ecosystems are an _improvement_ over the C-based
perfectly packaged stuff.  I can't in good conscience tell users of
these languages "your libraries are bad, stop using them" when I don't
have an alternative to offer them.

So, yes, we should keep a high standard for packaging.  However the
only way we can sustain that high standard for packaging is to also
have a high standard for what is packaged and provided to
applications; if we are not willing to do that, the high standard for
packaging will be unsutainable.
    Mirek