On 09/10/2015 09:53 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
The point of software is to provide a service to an end-user. Users
don't run software because it has good packaging policies, they run
software because it meets a need that they have. If they can't get
that software from Fedora, they *will* get it from another source (or
use a different OS that doesn't get in their way). I'll take a moment
to remind people that two of Fedora's Four Foundations are "Features"
and "First". We want Fedora to be the most feature-complete
distribution available and we want to get there before anyone else
does. I would say that holding to our no-bundling policy actively
defeats our efforts on that score.
Those are valid points, but I think that there are alternative
approaches to address them.
Can containerization it be leveraged to handle the packages which
require bundling? This way, we could maintain the principled stance, and
use containers with bundling packages as a temporary measure.
Secondly, I would argue that the 'Freedom' requirement results in more
restrictions in functionality than the 'no-bundling' requirement. We
deal with that by having specific 'rpmfusion' repositories, and this
workaround is well known, documented and accepted---so maybe another
approach is to have a 'rpmfusion-bundled' repo?
The reason for this proposal is relatively simple: we know the
advantages to unbundling, particularly with security and resource-
usage. However, the world's developer community largely *does not
care*. We fought the good fight, we tried to bring people around to
seeing our reasoning and we failed.
I think we should really pause and think about what does the 'does not
care' mindset entail. It's not just the attitude towards bundling: it
extends to security problems, integration issues, and who knows what
other aspect of the product. I concede that it's, as you said, a list of
the same tired arguments---but they do have a point! I think it is a
mistake to declare defeat, even if it's nominally only on the specific
issue of bundling.
I do understand the pragmatic motivation of your proposal, but we have
to calibrate it against the real and possible detriments. Taken to the
extreme, an overly permissive approach _could_ introduce enough crud to
affect the entire system. Please forgive me for sounding alarmist and
cynical but I am old enough to remember the 1990's FTP collections.
They were full of projects started by well-intentioned, pragmatic
developers, which evolved into an unmaintaintainable mess ---I am so
glad that we left that behind.
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