Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Ian Malone]

On 23 January 2014 21:57, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 16:54 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 13:48 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> >
>> >> > To be honest my concerns are more with my user hat on than my contributor
>> >> > hat - that we will lose the gold standard unified packaging standards and
>> >> > single source and mechanism for installing packages.
>> >>
>> >> I haven't seen anything from any WG that would suggest a deviation
>> >> from RPM packaging guidelines or using separate repositories.  It is a
>> >> valid concern and one we need to keep an eye on.
>> >
>> > Um. As I read it, three out of four WGs - desktop, server, and cloud -
>> > have at least discussed the possibility of implementing what are, in
>> > essence, secondary package management layers. The details differ - 'app
>> > bundles' for desktop, 'containers' or whatever for server and cloud -
>> > but the effect is the same.
>>
>> Secondary being the key word.  None of them are proposing alternate
>> RPM repositories or changing the Fedora packaging guidelines.  Tom was
>> expressing that he is concerned the Fedora repos would go away or be
>> of decreased quality.  None of the WG proposals are altering those
>> repos.  They will still exist, much as they do today.
>
> The repos will still exist, but things will be different. At present,
> the Fedora repos are the single unified official Fedora method for
> deploying software on Fedora products. Any other method you can use to
> deploy software is not an 'official Fedora' thing.
>
> If these plans go ahead, we will have multiple official/blessed methods
> for deploying software on Fedora, potentially with different policies
> about what software they can include and how that software should be
> arranged, how dependencies should be handled, and all the rest of it.
> Some of these methods will be shared between products, and some will
> either only exist in certain products, or at least be clearly associated
> with and 'owned' by those products.

So without, unfortunately, the time to read through reams of stuff on
this and with my user hat on (don't think I've seen any discussion of
this on the users list), if it means how fedora actually works is
better thought out then that's a good thing, but does this mean there
will be things unavailable on some 'products' that are not on others?
At the minute you install a spin and can add whatever other packages.
That's great if you want to do something like set up a quick web
server for testing or stream some music without creating VMs
everywhere. It sounds a bit like this plan may end up with finding you
can't do X on a Fedora system because you installed the wrong flavour.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk