Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Andrew Haley]

On 09/12/2015 03:21 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:

> But if we're in a situation where we are just killing ourselves
> shoehorning upstream's mess of bundled requirements into rpms and
> their response is just 'well just run "pip install foo" and be done
> with it', I think it's time to just let everyone do that.  Then
> maybe we can see if that is the way to software install nirvana or
> if admins start complaining about not being able to maintain their
> systems in a rational way.  We can then point these latter folks
> upstream and say this is what these folks wanted you to do, talk to
> them about it.

The development model followed by much of the upstream world is
immature: it may not even be repeatable, let alone well-defined.
Shoehorning upstream's mess of bundled requirements is a very useful
service that we can provide to our users.  By behaving in a mature way
we can show that free software can be more reliable (predictable,
trustworthy) than proprietary software.

I remember the time before free software distros like Fedora: it was
chaotic, with messes of bundles and contradictory dependencies from
all over the place, with no reliable tools for finding things.
Relying on the upstream ecosystem's way of sorting this out, with a
different mechanism provided depending on programming language, isn't
going to do it.

Andrew.