On Sep 9, 2015 7:06 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....
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
> --

As a follower of the discussion, and packager of an application that might fall under these requirements, your phrasing here makes me nervous.   I'm not reading "We will develop infrastructure for distributing xdg-apps", I'm reading "We will require infrastructure for development and distribution xdg-apps be developed".  Packages not represented in Software are installed by users now, and these packages will continue to be installed if Software deigns to only expose xdg-apps. 

I'm not sold.  I don't believe that the majority of users consume Fedora exactly as intended by this kind of strategy, and I am dubious that the project would be better off if they did.  The strength of Fedora is in both polish and extensibility.  Extremes in either direction weaken the appeal.  Look at devassist, for example - in my opinion, the one included 'application' serving the developer workstation use case.  There's talk of dumping it for lack of polish, and talk of deployment methodology mandates.... 

Either I'm totally lost, OR the GNOME spin should rebrand as a desktop computing appliance with a wholly curated experience, and the project should promote some other implementation as a versatile desktop Linux distribution.

--Pete