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

[Kevin Kofler]

Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 2 distributions add slightly different versions of the same functionality
> -> incompatible

I said that carrying more feature patches makes it "more likely" that 
packages from other distros will work, not "100% certain" (which is 
obviously not possible when there are incompatible versions of the same 
patchset floating around).

> Application compiled on Fedora using the new features -> doesn't work on
> other distribution

And that's not a problem for OUR users, only for those of the other 
distribution. So why would that be ours to worry about?

> Your advice would be making Fedora a _worse_ distribution for third-party
> developers, and you equate those third-party developers to developers of
> proprietary applications.

GCC supports __attribute__((deprecated("message"))) these days. So we can 
tag the added functions with something like:
__attribute__((deprecated("nonstandard function added by a non-upstream 
patch to make FooApp work, use in other applications strongly 
discouraged")))

If the developers opt to use those functions anyway, then that's not our 
problem.

> Not all Free Software is easy to compile from source, not all Free
> Software is packaged in Fedora. Forcing users to become packagers before
> they can use a third-party software is detrimental to Fedora's success.

I don't really agree, at least not fully. I think packaging software 
properly is a much more effective way to spend our time than making third-
party blobs work as is, especially WHEN those binaries are actually Free 
Software and can thus be packaged properly from source. Sure, the USERS 
should not have to become packagers, but the existing packagers should not 
waste their time on compatibility with binary blobs, but spend it usefully 
on packaging Free Software from source.

        Kevin Kofler