Some further thoughts on the "language specific repositories" idea

[Nick Coghlan]

I started writing a long email regarding some of my concerns about the
scalability of the "language specific repos" idea, and decided they'd be
better to capture on the wiki instead:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ncoghlan/User_level_package_management

In large part, it grows out of asking myself the question "What problem
are we actually trying to solve with language specific repos?", and it
seemed to mostly come down to having a way for users (including
developers) to install packages and manage dependencies *independently*
of the system package manager.

That then lead to some questions about the downsides of enabling that
(especially around auditing) and whether it's really feasible to fully
support every single language specific packaging system at the platform
layer - at some point, we're going to just have to treat those systems
as opaque binary blobs, and leave the issue of handling security updates
up to the application provider.

The other main concern I have is around integrating with the build and
review tooling - it seems to me like we may need an abstracted plugin
based hosting system like Pulp to make that a tractable problem, rather
than integrating directly with the ecosystem specific repository hosting
services.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Hosted & Shared Services
Software Engineering & Development, Brisbane

HSS Provisioning Architect