How to interpret F18 Blocker criterion

[Kamil Paral]

> 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*.

I also believe that the dual-boot support with Windows is important, should be thoroughly tested, and should be in our criteria. What annoys me is your reasoning being inconsistent with our past arguments about VirtualBox.

According to your explanation, VirtualBox support should be in a completely same position as dual-boot support with Windows. It does not change the Fedora platform, it just allows the project to run as a whole inside a virtualized environment. I believe it's even more important than dual-boot, because most of the newcomers don't install Fedora into dual-boot, they are scared and unsure about what might happen. They try it first in a VM, and #1 is usually VirtualBox. I come across that in all my Fedora presentations, I even _recommend_ people to use VirtualBox prior to installing Fedora into dual-boot!

Yet, we don't give a damn about VirtualBox support. It's not in our criteria. We don't care much about its issues. We care a bit, but not much. Even though it's even open-source. (And it's very hard to find reasons why it's not included in Fedora, except for a single sentence here [1]).

I understand there are issues that we can't fix, because VirtualBox itself would have to be modified, and it's not under our direct control. But there are many issues that we can fix, like bugs in cirrus driver etc. And still we keep telling people "we don't support VirtualBox, this is not a blocker", even when it's a showstopper and we could fix it if we wanted.

So if the philosophy should really be interpreted as you say, I still find inconsistencies in our approach. Not with Windows support being superfluous, but with other components being missing.


[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archive:Features/VirtualBox