Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 02:16:23PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Read all the above sequentially. My point is that although you are
> technically correct that no WG has proposed doing away with the repos,
> the RPM format, or yum/dnf, their plans - under a reasonable
> interpretation of the discussions so far - still invalidate the
> assumptions he is currently making: he can no longer assume that all he
> basically has to worry about is getting 'Fedora' installed somehow and
> he can then install whatever he likes. Broadly stated, it will no longer
> be valid to conceive of Fedora as a large package repository with some
> installation methods attached to it, whereas currently that's a pretty
> reasonable conceptual framework that I believe many people (not just
> Tom) employ.
> 
> In other words, Tom was really correct. ;)

Well, maybe. It really is the case that nothing is finalized and it's a
legitimate concern. This is why we (and here I'm using "we" not in the royal
sense but because it really wasn't just _me_) have the Base Design, not just
three separate product working groups. I share the trepidation about adding
more bureaucracy, but also seems pretty important to keep a coherent shared
base. 

It's possible that eventually it'll be kind of hard to go from Fedora
Workstation to Fedora Cloud, or from Fedora Cloud to Fedora Workstation --
but that's not _really_ so different from how it is now, where if you start
from one of those and try to go to the other, you're going to have to tear
down a bunch of things first. On the other hand, the Cloud WG made the
ability to go from Fedora Cloud to Fedora Server an explicit goal.

Either way, I think it's pretty likely that someone who wants to start with
the base and build up will be able to with, with varying possible degrees of
difficulty. It may also end up that it's easier to make and share specific,
lightweight remixes, so that while you don't necessarily build up in an
install, you do it in a tool of some sort -- that was part of Stephen
Gallagher's original "products" idea, if I'm remembering right.

> > So yes, there may very well be different options.  That doesn't mean
> > they can't also be the same if you choose not to use those different
> > things.
> Is that going to be a reasonably sustainable approach, though? It's at
> least possible that it won't. What if the Desktop 'product' starts
> caring much about shipping commonly-used desktop applications as 'app
> bundles' rather than packages? What if the Server 'product' implements
> Wordpress as a container image rather than a package?

That might happen, although I would be shocked if anyone has anything near
workable for F21 timeframe. Or F22. But, would it be so bad? People who are
interested in packaging it in the traditional way still could... or, at
least _I_ hope so -- that's been part of my version of the proposal since
the beginning.

-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>