[Fedora-packaging] Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2015-09-11 at 11:17 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 09:30:37PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > 4. It seems fairly clear that BOMP was intended to mean, basically,
> > 'don't take a bunch of tarballs from different places and stuff
> > them
> > all into one package'. It was *not* intended to cover 'library
> > bundling' in any sense. I'd suggest that it should be clarified
> > somewhat - perhaps including an explicit internal link to DOSL -
> > and
> > the link from BOMP to NBL should be *removed*, since it is not
> > appropriate there.
> 
> In other words, the initial concern was keeping _Fedora_ from
> bundling
> things, not with keeping upstreams from doing it (or even rejecting
> upstreams that did). I think that's probably because that practice
> upstream was much more rare back then — it just wasn't a big issue,
> and
> it probably seemed reasonable that we _could_ influence the weird
> cases
> where it did happen.

No, not quite. BOMP came much later than DOSL. Of all the bits of text
I referred to in the timeline, the basic prohibition on bundled
libraries - DOSL - is the *oldest*: I can't tell you exactly how long
it's been around as we don't have the pre-MW history available and I
couldn't find it by other means, but I at least found package reviews
going back to 2006 which cite the exact text "duplication of system
libraries", and there's also a post on the initial guidelines for
Fedora Extras which includes that string.

So we've basically forbidden library bundling more or less since the
year dot (I suspect, but can't prove, that the text initially existed
as some kind of Red Hat internal rule for RHL, and got carried over to
Fedora); everything that's happened since then has been a refinement
or clarification of that policy.

BOMP was added much later, so it wasn't "the initial concern", it was
more that a *different* kind of 'bundling' became a concern later on.
What appears to have happened is that people started making packages
like 'some-awesome-fonts', or something like that, which pulled
together several different fonts from several different upstreams.
This was considered to be a problem, and a fairly involved guideline
was drafted specifically about font packaging - it used to live right
above BOMP.

As part of the review process of the font guideline, the more general
BOMP guideline was proposed and also accepted - that's in the FPC
meeting log I linked:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Minutes/20080826?rd=Packaging/Minutes/20080826 .
It's noted during the meeting that there was already an informal
convention that multiple-unrelated-sources were a Bad Thing, and so it
would make sense to just write that down.

Fairly soon after, the font-specific guideline was effectively moved
into the dedicated Packaging:FontsPolicy page. spot fiddled with the
pages several times on Jan 20, 2009; by the time he was done, things
looked more or less as they do now, with the general BOMP guideline
then a short fonts section which linked out to Packaging:FontsPolicy
where the detailed, font-specific guideline lived.

> > Does this make sense to folks? I'm willing to draft up the changes
> > and
> > file an FPC ticket if so. I think any debate on what changes
> > should be
> > made to the current policies would benefit from these changes to
> > make
> > what the current policies actually *are* clearer, so I don't mind
> > doing it even if they all have to change again fairly soon.
> 
> Makes sense, yeah.

OK, I'll work up some drafts and a ticket.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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