Matthew Miller wrote:
Of course, this seems irrelevant to Fedora -- we're not on the
hook to
Support anything with a capital S, and yet we often do make
community-based efforts to help with just about any softare. But there is
a related problem: sometimes, in order to package up some application
which a contributor might care about, they have to also package up and
become the owner of a bunch of dependencies that they really _don't_ know
or care about.
It would be useful for that contributor to be able to say "I build these
packages so I can ship the thing I'm invested in, but... user and other
contributors, beware".
Now, solving that isn't in the requirements modularity, but it *is*
something that'd be nice to address, so if modularity happens to, cool.
I disagree that this is a useful concept to enable or encourage. Fedora
should be about cooperation rather than walled gardens. If the packager is
uncomfortable with maintaining the package, they are welcome to ask for
comaintainers, especially if it turns out that there are more people
interested in the package. But taking the package private by default and
asking other interested people to either duplicate the packaging effort (and
cause conflicts, at least if the dependencies are also installed at runtime)
or explicitly coordinate a move of the package out of the module (which will
also cause trouble with the module upgrade path issues that were already
discussed) is just not a productive thing to do.
Kevin Kofler