How to interpret F18 Blocker criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-11-06 at 11:06 -0500, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > On 11/06/2012 02:30 PM, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > >> The F18 Blocker criteria contain:
> > >>
> > >> The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
> > >> existing clean single-partition Windows installation and either
> > >> install
> > >> a bootloader which can boot into the Windows installation, or
> > >> leave
> > >> the
> > >> Windows bootloader untouched and working
> > >>
> > >> What must be understood under "single-partition"?
> > >>
> > >> Alexander
> > > The intended purpose is to say this should be a default Windows
> > > installation, which usually consist of a single NTFS partition.
> > >
> > > But we should probably improve the description, because recent
> > > Windows (at least Win 7) create two partitions - 100MB "System
> > > Reserved" and then the rest of the space for "disk C".
> > 
> > What's the reason for this criteria and why is it only limited to
> > windows as opposed to OS-X and other OS in general?
> 
> Good question. I guess the answer is "practicality", dual boot with
> Windows is the most common use case. We can't really extend this
> criterion to _any_ operating system, we don't really want to block
> Fedora because it can't properly dual-boot with Haiku or whatever, do
> we?

Right. It's a pragmatic consideration. We can't support all dual boot
cases, and dual booting alongside Windows is the most common and
important to support (as it's what you need to do to attract new
converts).

> OTOH I find somewhat inconsistent that our release criterion is
> related to a closed-source proprietary product, while Fedora
> philosophy, as currently interpreted/written, refuses these links [1].

I don't think there's a conflict at all. All distros work hard to dual
boot with Windows successfully because that's how you get people to try
Linux: i.e., it's actually a key thing to have *in order to driver our
philosophy*.

>  The current approach is that we don't care about problems with
> VirtualBox, with nvidia drivers, with just about _anything_ that is
> not included in Fedora. This test case doesn't really resonate with
> it. 

I disagree, because there's a vital difference. The dual boot case is
about having Fedora - fully 'philosophy compliant' Fedora - working
_alongside_ a different proprietary operating system; a configuration
that's important to support for 'ideological' reasons as much as any
others (see above). What we don't support is proprietary components
*inside our own operating system*.

> Personally I find the philosophy in a direct clash with practicality
> and too extreme.
> 
> [1]  The Fedora Project is not interested in having its distribution
> be a platform for proprietary or patent encumbered components. While
> we do not purposely make installation of such components more
> difficult, we also do not allow our schedule or processes to be driven
> by theirs. 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives

See? Perfectly compatible. In a dual boot scenario, Fedora is not being
'a platform for proprietary components'. The proprietary 'component' in
question is entirely independent from Fedora and works fine without it.
We are not 'enabling' proprietary software by booting alongside it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net