Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2015-09-11 at 09:02 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> One can only tilt at windmills for so long before one's horse gives
> out. This battle has been fought for years and while it has not been
> entirely fruitless, it's not yielding significant results

I think this rather undersells it, to be fair. I think that back
before the emergence of large ecosystems where bundling was the norm,
distro bundling policies probably *did* yield significant results -
distros had more power then, the F/OSS ecosystem was smaller and
easier to impose norms on. The problem we face now is that the world
has changed and there are huge chunks of the F/OSS ecosystem which see
bundling as just the way they do things; the problem with our current
policy is it gives us no way to even reasonably consider what's an
appropriate relationship with those ecosystems. All we can do is
repeat the ~1995 mantra that the One True Way to work with Fedora is
to turn your software into some nicely unbundled RPM packages, which
is something they will just laugh out of court, and then we're
effectively just not talking to each other at all.

I'd prefer us to have some kind of sensible relationship with those
kinds of ecosystems - even if in the end it's simply to say 'the way
you get this software on Fedora is to use their distribution
mechanism', and our job is just to work with the ecosystem to make
sure that works nicely on Fedora.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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