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(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader