what it takes to unbundle, in triangle form

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2015 at 03:37:32PM +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
> Maybe we're trying to do too much.
> 
> I suppose it's a question of choosing to do something which from a
> software engineering perspective is not the best practice or not
> including a package at all. I'd certainly prefer to see a somewhat
> smaller well-engineered system than open the doors to packages with
> their own versions of dependencies, each with their own set of bugs.

The thing is, this is only one aspect of the quality of the packaging —
and let alone bugs and problems in the code itself, which are usually
even bigger in terms of user impact. So, making *this* particular facet
the deciding factor doesn't quite seem right to me.

I think the *general* idea, of having a smaller-well engineered core is
a good one. It's just.... really hard to define exactly what that is,
let alone to do the practical work of untangling dependencies. But
that's basically what the "Fedora Modularization" initiative is all
about.

>From an unrelated practical point of view: consider that the metadata
pulled down so DNF can operate is basically the same size as the entire
(compressed) Fedora Cloud Base image. It'd be very nice to not have
that overhead (but still have wider package set available when you want
it).

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