Ramblings and questions regarding Fedora, but stemming from gnome-software and desktop environments

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

/*Bill Nottingham <notting at splat.cc>*/ wrote on Wed, 7 Jan 2015 10:56:31 
-0500:
> Hedayat Vatankhah (hedayat.fwd at gmail.com) said:
>> /*Bill Nottingham <notting at splat.cc>*/ wrote on Tue, 6 Jan 2015 11:39:27
>> -0500:
>>> <...>
>>> - Even searching for -devel packages implies a "target == host" build
>>>    sensibility that is relevant mostly to those developing Fedora, and
>>>    not to most of those developers that I run into on a day-to-day basis
>>>    (and likely not the developers we're targeting.) They're interested
>>>    in using mock along with system libraries for RHEL/CentOS, using
>>>    pip/npm/rubygems, etc.
>> So you mean that Fedora target developers are either using dynamic
>> languages, or they develop native software for RHEL/CentOS?! So you believe
>> that "target == rhel/centos"? And native software developers for *modern*
>> distros are not targets? This is really offending. RHEL/CentOS themselves
>> should mainly target their developers. I guess that most of the developers
>> you run into are working for RedHat.
> ... Not at Red Hat now, but what I'm saying is that the developers I
> interact with are targeting mainly Ubuntu LTS and CentOS/RHEL, even if their
> devel platform is Fedora.  It goes back to uses of Fedora in production -
> while Fedora Server certainly wants to change this, most all of the
> *deployed* server systems that people are targeting for their code aren't
> Fedora.  Once you assume that you want to support the use case of developers
> using Fedora to develop for things that aren't Fedora, I just feel
> that worrying about a package tool for installing -devel packages pales in
> trying to streamline the workflows the developers needs around using things
> like mock and jenkins as build tools, and test environments that aren't even
> local to the machine at all, whether they involve virtualization,
> containers, or remote cloud services.
Well, I agree completely that solving the issue of installing -devel 
packages is not enough to make Fedora suitable for developers; but it is 
certainly needed. However, it would be even better if Fedora can be a 
great general purpose development platform supporting development for 
other targets such as RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu and even Windows (using mingw 
toolchain + wine, and then maybe virtual environments/remote access to 
run/test/debug on real Windows OS); which could expand to development 
for embedded devices/OSes like Android. But, IMHO, support for none of 
these should be more important than native Fedora development; specially 
since targeting OSes like RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu LTS is usually important 
for developers for commercial software. Someone who is developing 
free(open source) software usually prefers to use 'latest and greatest', 
for which usually Fedora and it's -devel packages are one of the best 
things available out there. And I think free software developers should 
be top priority for Fedora compared to others. There is nothing wrong 
with supporting others, but the "main" target developers should be free 
software developers, and they are less likely to need using mock or RHEL 
system libraries.

Regards,
Hedayat




>
> Bill

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