Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2015 at 02:33:34AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > I think this strikes a fair balance between promoting packaging hygiene
> > and recognizing that not all upstream communities feel the same way Fedora
> > packagers do about bundled libraries.
> The thing is, it should NOT matter at all how upstream feels. If we treat 
> unbundling as something to do with upstream, we already failed. Unbundling 
> must be done whether upstream likes it or not, even in upstream's spite! And 
> it's the packager's job to do it: "upstream does not support it" is NOT a 
> valid excuse for not unbundling!

In many cases, this effectively means creating a Fedora-specfic fork of
the project. Even if we accept unbundling as goal in itself is a given,
there just aren't enough people in the world who have the inclination,
time, and expertise to do this. Especially when you consider that for
most projects, the only people with *deep* understanding of this kind
of invasive change *are* the upstream. So, in practice, assuming
inclination, time, and *just enough* expertise, what we risk is a
debundled package with new, unique bugs, possibly with security
implications of their own. That's not getting us closer to the goal,
even if it feels like it's a rule that *ought* to.

There are people with inclination and expertise, but not time. The new
rules will help with that; their time and expertise can be focused
where it has the most meaningful impact, which might actually be on
automated tooling rather than debundling.


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