Meeting minutes for Env-and-Stacks WG meeting (2015-01-14)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 January 2015 at 03:23, Honza Horak <hhorak at redhat.com> wrote:
> These are really interesting ideas, even if I don't understand all physics
> equivalences :)
>
> About the amount of man-hours needed for any different model, I think the
> current model does not require little amount of man power at all, I'd rather
> say keeping all things work nicely together require actually quite
> substantial amount of knowledge and time fixing compatibility issues.
> Decoupling could help to see and fix the issues.
>
> However, as we start decoupling things, I see there might arise new
> challenges regarding compatibility of those parts -- which is actually where
> I see the discussions about rings model should give us some answers and we
> should find a way how to ensure the compatibility with reasonable amount of
> man-power. Anyway, I agree that in case we find it requires too much
> resources, it should be a reason to change the concept.

One thing to keep in mind is that when we talk about "Stacks" in the
Environments & Stacks model, the idea is that Fedora is responsible
for providing the *base* of the stack, and potentially tools for
application level dependency management within the stack. What we're
*not* responsible for is integration testing *of* the stack.

The whole point of this is to provide a layer where Fedora as a distro
provider says "above this point, the onus for integration testing and
security updates is on the application developer, not the distro".

*Within* Fedora, we should *not* be providing divergent copies of
applications. httpd should be httpd, regardless of whether you're
running Workstation, Server or Cloud.

But a developer may choose to do their own integration testing and use
a httpd Software Collection, rather than the one integrated directly
into the Fedora platform. They'd then gain the benefit that their SCL
based project could use the *same* SCL to also run on supported
versions of RHEL and CentOS, rather than just on Fedora. However,
they'd have to build and test their own packages to run *on top* of
the SCL, or use a non-RPM dependency management system like pip, cpan
rubygems, etc for the application components.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia