Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Subhendu Ghosh]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 11:51 AM, Bill Nottingham <notting at splat.cc> wrote:

>
> ...
>
> To allow or not allow bundling is the small side point here - the questions
> should be more of "Are we a distribution of packages?  Are we an OS?  Where
> do we see the distribution/OS fit in how software is consumed and provided?
> Is that different for a Workstation vs an Atomic host?" Answer those big
> questions, and the questions on what to do along Ring0->RingN, what
> bundling
> to allow, etc. should fall out.
>
>
>
To take this comment from Bill a little further.

Assume software X with all its bundled dependencies are not part of Fedora
due to to current policy. If that software is still desired by users to be
deployable on Fedora - that should be possible. After all Freedom is one of
the foundation of Fedora. How should Fedora enable that even if it is not
in Fedora? If it is coming from a 3rd party repo - the big question is does
it look and behave like a 3rd party application? or does it try to look and
behave like an in-distro application from Fedora.

If it is the latter - then we have failed to set guidelines or examples for
3rd parties. The Linux FileSystem Hierarchy has been in existent for a
really long time, it benefited fro the practices of UNIX development before
it. In particular, there is a clear demarcation for add-on software
installation [1]

If you take that into consideration, then as you move the line between
distribution and OS, packages that fall on the OS side should maintain
unbundled status. Packages that are on distribution side should have more
flexibility, and packages from 3rd party repo should definitely not
conflict with Fedora's.

While the number of packages in Fedora is impressive, it is no where near
the where the opensource community is headed [2]. Annual surveys by
BlackDuck [3] continue to show this exponential growth. This growth pattern
in open source software means that Fedora will never be able to ship
everything. So HOW is the Fedora user free to leverage the Fedora platform
to run software that is not shipped in the distribution. This is part of
the active guidance that Greg was missing when he blogged about Fedora
working against upstream. Creating that guidance will have a direct
relationship to the bundling/unbundling policy

-subhendu


[1] http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s13.html
[2]
http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2008-2/the-total-growth-of-open-source/
[3]
http://www.slideshare.net/blackducksoftware/2014-future-of-open-source-survey-results
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