[Fedora-packaging] SCL discussion at yesterday's meeting, easy stuff

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2013-11-12 at 17:21 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Essentially, it's defining the borders of the OS differently.

 I think everyone is aware that SCLs are "different", but it's not like
we _have_ to throw away all the rules/expectations about everything.

>  If you feel
> that the OS is 'all software shipped by Fedora in the everything repo', then
> you might feel that they shouldn't belong in /opt. I feel that the actual OS
> is smaller than "the total of everything that we ship", and so therefore
> /opt is a place to package other things that Fedora might produce.

 Your original remark was that "/opt is good because enterprises like to
have different things be stored separately, and /opt is much easier to
do this with than /usr/lib/scls" ... and I would 100% agree that if an
enterprise produces an SCL for something, they might well want/require
that to be stored differently and hence live in /opt.
 I could even accept that it's possible some (most maybe) will want that
to be true for SCLs coming from software-collections.org and/or random
other third parties.

 But from Fedora itself?

> If it makes it simpler to think of SCLs as additional 'products' that go on
> top of an OS, does that help?  The way that F19/F20 is packaged now in a
> single repository may not reflect this, but I think the way that the three
> products are being discussed, with a separate 'environments and stacks'
> group, with a separate Fedora Commons group, etc.  may make this clear.

 Again, yes, SCLs will be different as an example "rubygem-rails" is
compatible with the OS and changes as it does but say "scl-rails-4.0"
has compatibility/upgrade/etc. guarantees that are separate from the OS
and thus. you can install the same SCL on multiple versions of Fedora
and get the same thing.
 That, to me, would be the main difference. But it's still from Fedora,
and I'd still expect it to integrate into the OS to as high a standard
as possible. Even if SCLs all came from a fedora-scls repo. (which I
think would be a good idea), I'd still assume those things.

> Alternatively, if you look at enterprise releases + EPEL, I would say that
> you wouldn't consider EPEL 'part of the OS', and treating the same things in
> Fedora as part of the OS simply because they're part of the same repo isn't
> necessarily right.

 Depending on what you mean by "part of the OS' you'd get very different
answers from me to that. Certainly my expectations for how well a
package integrates into the OS would be very different between EPEL and
a random third party repo. 

 And to agree again, while we've historically been handcuffed with the
memories/problems of fedora-core and extras, I'd be very happy for
Fedora to move away from it's single "fedora" repo. model ... but I'd
want the differences between the repos. to be explicit and not deviate
apart from that.