Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2015-10-07)

[Jóhann B. Guðmundsson]

On 10/09/2015 02:16 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-10-09 at 13:50 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
>> >I agree - the new wording does appear to give in to poor programming
>> >practices.
> Bundling is_not_  intrinsically poor practice.  Firefox is a good
> example of this, there have been several cases where using the system
> instance of cairo has been a regression relative to the bundled
> version, because firefox relied on the internal details of how a
> particular version of cairo worked, and a newer and ostensibly better
> cairo would break those assumptions.
>
> Maybe we can argue that firefox was wrong to make those assumptions.
> Maybe we can argue that cairo wasn't living up to its own interface
> contract.  Who cares?  The result from the consumer's perspective is
> that bundling produces a working firefox, and unbundling produces a
> broken firefox, so bundling is desirable.  From the firefox developers'
> perspective, bundling allows them to ship a product that is known to
> actually work, so bundling is desirable.
>
> So from an OS maintenance perspective we have to recognize that
> bundling code occasionally does have merit, and that it is incumbent on
> us to manage it well.  And from a Fedora perspective, we have to
> acknowledge that a prohibition policy ignores that reality, that we
> have not consistently enforced it, and that we do ourselves and our
> users a disservice to insist on it.

Interesting taking the consumer perspective.

So where does FESCo intend to draw the line now that it has chosen to 
head down this path.

For example is the next step for Fedora to dissociate itself with 
upstream and start implementing "workarounds" instead of fixing things 
where they belong to satisfy the end users needs and expectation as well?

JBG