Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 10/28/2013 11:25 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>> Our transitioning process needs to be able to cover 500+
>> applications ( or in other words be as generic as possible ) or so,
>> so it obviously cannot depend on the existence of web fronted
>> otherwise we would be excluding 99% of those server applications.
>
> I'm not sure I agree with "cover 500+ applications". I'm not convinced
> (yet) that our responsibility is to be shipping the full set of server
> applications currently available in the greater Fedora universe.
>
> I'd like for us to be focusing on a *platform* and a set of standard,
> visible APIs and working with the Base Design and Environments/Stacks
>  groups to have service packages treated similarly to "apps" in other
> operating systems. We ourselves don't necessarily need to do all of
> the porting to accommodate this (though we will probably want to
> select a group of high-value servers that we use as examples, such as
> Apache HTTPD and BIND).

I generally agree - though I'd focus more on getting the "high-value
servers" working well than on calling ourselves a "platform" - it's
far too easy to make a platform that doesn't "work" without noticing
when there are no major users of the platform.

> Also, I'd like for us to try to manage this separation so that we can
> allow our consumers to pick and choose which server they actually
> want, rather than necessarily the freshest upstream bits.

For the "high-value" servers (which provide external functionality,
not an application API), I strongly disagree.  We should be managing
the transitions (no functionality dropped, all configuration migrated)
so that the user will never want to use the older version.

For APIs / runtimes, yes, we have no choice but to provide the older
versions when the upstreams make ABI-incompatible changes.
    Mirek