Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

Przemek Klosowski przemek.klosowski at nist.gov
Thu Sep 10 19:10:23 UTC 2015


On 09/10/2015 09:53 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> The point of software is to provide a service to an end-user. Users
> don't run software because it has good packaging policies, they run
> software because it meets a need that they have. If they can't get
> that software from Fedora, they *will* get it from another source (or
> use a different OS that doesn't get in their way). I'll take a moment
> to remind people that two of Fedora's Four Foundations are "Features"
> and "First". We want Fedora to be the most feature-complete
> distribution available and we want to get there before anyone else
> does. I would say that holding to our no-bundling policy actively
> defeats our efforts on that score.
Those are valid points, but I think that there are alternative 
approaches to address them.
Can containerization it be leveraged to handle the packages which 
require bundling? This way, we could maintain the principled stance, and 
use containers with bundling packages as a temporary measure.

Secondly, I would argue that the 'Freedom' requirement results in more 
restrictions in functionality than the 'no-bundling' requirement. We 
deal with that by having specific 'rpmfusion' repositories, and this 
workaround is well known, documented and accepted---so maybe another 
approach is to have a 'rpmfusion-bundled' repo?
> The reason for this proposal is relatively simple: we know the
> advantages to unbundling, particularly with security and resource-
> usage. However, the world's developer community largely *does not
> care*. We fought the good fight, we tried to bring people around to
> seeing our reasoning and we failed.
I think we should really pause and think about what does the 'does not 
care' mindset entail. It's not just the attitude towards bundling: it 
extends to security problems, integration issues, and who knows what 
other aspect of the product. I concede that it's, as you said, a list of 
the same tired arguments---but  they do have a point!  I think it is a 
mistake to declare defeat, even if it's nominally only on the specific 
issue of bundling.

I do understand the pragmatic motivation of your proposal, but we have 
to calibrate it against the real and possible detriments. Taken to the 
extreme, an overly permissive approach _could_ introduce enough crud to 
affect the  entire system.  Please forgive me for sounding alarmist and 
cynical but  I am old enough to remember the 1990's FTP collections. 
They were full of projects  started by well-intentioned, pragmatic 
developers,  which evolved into an unmaintaintainable mess ---I am so 
glad that we left that behind.
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