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

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Fri, 2015-09-11 at 17:00 +0000, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
> 
> On 09/10/2015 01:53 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> > I assume that subject line got your attention.
> > 
> > I know this is a long-standing debate and that this thread is
> > likely
> > to turn into an incomprehensible flamewar filled with the same
> > tired
> > arguments, but I'm going to make a proposal and then attempt to
> > respond to many of those known arguments up-front (in the hopes
> > that
> > we can try to keep the conversation on-track).
> 
> Why are you continuing pushing this after this has been rejected
> what 
> two or three times already?
> 

Actually, we haven't really had a formal top-level decision on this.
It's been discussed and petered out a few times, but it's worth
continuing to re-evaluate and see if impressions have changed.


> What´s your end game here, which components do you so desperately
> need 
> Fedora to ship bundled ( which exception could be made for instead )
> and 
> why cant RH just do this themselves with RHEL since obviously it
> needs 
> otherwise you would not be pushing this so hard?
> 


Actually, the opposite is true. RHEL has fewer limitations in this
space. Red Hat's layered projects ship a fair amount of bundled stuff.
This problem is entirely Fedora's. Fedora has far stricter rules than
RHEL in this regard.

As for which components, it's not about specific examples[1]. It's
about solving the question in a generic way. We have quite a lot of
software that isn't packaged for Fedora (either not started or aborted
when the package review couldn't be passed) that has genuine value.

To me (speaking as a user of Fedora, maintainer of Fedora software and
developer of both Fedora and upstream projects), the current situation
is not ideal. In many cases, we're holding so rigidly to the "no
bundling" policy that it is actively harmful to Fedora's Mission:
"The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and
open source software and content as a collaborative community." When
we aren't capable of shipping and working with upstreams that *are*
advancing the FOSS world, we are failing in our mission to be a leader
in that space.


[1] Ok, that's not entirely true; this conversation was kicked off
when it looked like 'darktable' (a critical component for the Design
Suite and Fedora Design Team) was going to be denied an exception.
However that was just the latest in an unending series of such cases.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20150911/ae8f1af2/attachment.sig>