On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 6:06 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Wed, 2015-09-09 at 18:33 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
However, it is unclear to me 1) what you mean by mandate, and 2) how you plan on doing so at a Fedora Project level particularly when the project has not committed to shipping any kind of xdg-app at all. I believe the desire and intentions are there, but mandate seems a bit bold at this point.
In the Workstation WG, there is consensus on moving towards distributing applications as xdg-app bundles. Applications will be required to bundle any library not provided by the xdg-app runtime. I don't think we have made any formal decisions regarding this, but it seems almost inevitable at this point. We also haven't defined what applications will be required to use xdg-app, but history tells us that if the answer isn't "almost everything," the project will fail. An optional application sandbox is a pointless application sandbox; developers aren't going to use it if it's optional, since that's more work for them.
Yes, Coprs are being used to provide useful software outside of the Fedora repositories. This is not surprising at all. What would be the good of building the Copr infrastructure if it wasn't used? I also don't think it is all that much of a problem either.
I don't really understand what the end goal is with coprs, I suppose, and I'm not sure if the copr developers or anyone else does either. There's really no practical difference to the end user whether the application is in Fedora or a copr, so long as it appears in GNOME Software. But if the packaging guidelines can be circumvented simply by migrating applications to a copr, then applications are going to migrate to coprs. Eventually we're going to have a lot fewer applications in the Fedora repositories. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't really see why it's desirable....
Accepting all premises above, Copr end run around means application sandboxing is pointless, and xdg-app will fail because it makes both optional.