Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2014-01-25 at 12:04 +0100, Alec Leamas wrote:


> After hacking a simple tool which provides a GUI for a repository file
> it's possible to create repository packages complete with  desktop and
> appdata file. I have some 5-10 such repository packages under way, my
> plan is to push them into rpmfusion.   

http://rpmfusion.org/Contributors#Read_the_packaging_guidelines

"RPM Fusion follows the Fedora packaging guidelines, make sure you've
read and understood these:

    Naming Guidelines

    Guidelines"

"Guidelines" is a link to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines :

"Configuration for package managers in Fedora MUST ONLY reference the
official Fedora repositories in their default enabled and disabled state
(see the yum repo configuration in the fedora-release package for the
canonical list). Unofficial and third-party repositories that contain
only packages that it is legal for us to direct people to in Fedora (see
the Forbidden items and Licensing:Main pages for an explanation of what
is legal) may be shipped in %{_docdir}. The idea is that the system
administrator would need to explicitly copy the configuration file from
doc into the proper location on the filesystem if they want to enable
the repository."

Presumably one is to s/Fedora/RPMFusion and Fedora/g/ when reading that
as applying to Fusion, but still, Fusion's policies would appear to
forbid you to ship packages that contain 'active' external repository
configuration.

> If there will be a way for users to aggregate appdata from different
> sources such as rpmfusion  (don't fully really understand this process
> right now) users will be able to search and find also non-free items
> as long there is a packaged repository for them. It should work out of
> the box right now using old-school tools based on package metadata.

> Not ideal, but perhaps something.

So I found this point interesting in thinking about these issues this
morning. There was a post of Hughesie's (I think) in another thread
which was also illuminating: it suggested the design of Software is to
be a generic 'software' installer - to provide as much 'software' from
as many sources as possible, under the 'it's all just software' theory,
I guess.

I think the assumption that this is obviously the right design is
interesting, because I strongly disagree - not just for legal or policy
reasons, but because that's most definitely *not* what I want. I don't
want a 'greedy' software installer that just finds every piece of crap
on the internet and offers it to me. I appreciate the curation that
repositories provide, I tend my repository configuration carefully, and
I really do only want to be offered software from my configured
repositories as a matter of course, and yes, I do not expect that the
packages from my configured repos will go and set up other repos, and I
would be quite angry if they did.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net