Re: Question about the new 3rd party software policy and standardization across the distro

On Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 12:33:13PM -0400, Ben Rosser wrote:
> Sure, but currently, it seems to be the case that if I sit down at, say, a
> Fedora Server or Fedora Workstation system and install some piece of
> software, it will install in "the same way". By this I don't so much mean
> packaging format, but in terms of compile time options enabled, optional
> dependencies installed, etc. Is this something that is no longer considered
> desirable?

I think there are some areas where it's actually less than desirable. I
mean, we shouldn't go out of our way to make it impossible, but there
are some things we shouldn't make easy to do by accident. For example,
we may want to move to a longer lifecycle for Fedora Server - say, two
years, for example - while keeping Workstation on 13 months. If we do
that, we probably would like to stop doing security updates for GNOME
at the Workstation EOL (otherwise, we're paying - both literally and
figuratively - for the longer lifecycle without _providing_ it). And if
there are no security updates, we wouldn't want people to think "oh,
I'll just get a two-year lifecycle desktop by putting GNOME on Fedora
Server", when they can't.

> Sure, and I think that is admirable. But I guess I'm approaching this from
> the view of someone who has not productized (editionized?) most of his
> Fedora installations, because they were installed before Fedora 21 and I
> chose not to do so when upgrading. If this is a per-edition thing, how
> would I enable officially sanctioned third-party software repositories? Or
> what if I'm running a desktop spin that chooses not to ship any of, say,
> Workstation's 3rd party repositories for whatever reason? Presumably, there
> would be some way for me pick and choose them despite not having an
> editionized installation.

I presume the same, but also, in that case, there'd be the expectation
that you're making the informed choice yourself.

> Maybe in practice these issues will never crop up because the kind of
> (third party) software that Workstation wants to curate doesn't overlap
> with Server (for example), though.

I think it's generally important that software developers (and
sysadmins, for that matter) be able to run software targetted at Fedora
Server on their Workstation. However, in the not-too-distant future,
the answer for that is to run Server-based containers. Like this:
https://blog.fishsoup.net/2016/08/24/summer-talks-purpleegg/

--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm@fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
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