On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 02:40:15PM -0500, Jared K. Smith wrote:
Given the short shelf-life of a Fedora release and the complication
involved in Software Collections, I'm still not convinced that we
really need this in Fedora. Can you give me a concrete case where
Fedora really needs to be running two different versions of the same
software, in a production environment? Given it's longer shelf life
and different target audience, RHEL is a better candidate -- and the
record, the company I work for uses Software Collections that way.
I'm just having a hard time justifying it in my mind for Fedora.
Three things:
1) Fedora is big enough that we have concrete situations where one size
doesn't fit all. Puppet being broken on F17 (and probably F18 as well)
is a fine example of something within the distro itself. And, as a
platform for development, offering more version choices to our users
would be a strength.
2) On a long-lived platform, Software Collections can provide a way to move
faster than the base. On a fast-moving platform like Fedora, we could use
it in the other way: providing longer-lived versions of certain
components even as the base is upgraded.
3) It's the ecosystem. If using Software Collections on RHEL is good for
your company, it's good for it to work on Fedora, because a) we're the
upstream and problems get worked out here, b) development resources
benefit Fedora rather than being "spent" in a pocket universe, and c)
Software Collections which work across the whole ecosystem in a
consistent way make us a stronger choice for development work which may
eventually end up on Enterprise Linux in production.
Obviously all of these areas (particularly #2) have significant policy,
infrastructure, and resource needs to work out. Maybe they're such that it's
not worth it, we can't do it, or we find a better way to accomplish the same
goals. But either way, that's why I'm bringing this up.
--
Matthew Miller ☁☁☁ Fedora Cloud Architect ☁☁☁ <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>