On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 8:20 AM, Ian Malone <ibmalone@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10 January 2017 at 10:08, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 01/08/2017 01:52 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>>
>> Brendan Conoboy wrote:
>>>
>>> Enhancing interoperability increases the reach of Fedora and doesn't
>>> require a bit of compromise on the the Freedom principle.
>>
>>
>> Splitting a single well-integrated distribution (where all the pieces are
>> known to work well together) into a bunch of loosely-coupled black-box
>> modules that have no idea what libraries the other modules even contain
>> actually DECREASES interoperability.
>
>
> Only if you do not rebuild each modules from scratch (with the exception of
> the build tools themselves, but which do not end up in the module). If you
> do rebuild the module, the build process of each component could be made
> aware what is available in the module, and integrate well with the features
> which are available.
>
> I think this would resemble what's being done in the embedded space with
> Yocto and BitBake.
>

Isn't that another problem? Aside from the fact you now need to
rebuild dependencies of each component every time, there's now scope
for package foo to be built with bar-2.1 while faa is built against
bar-3.0 and fuu uses its own bundled bar which was forked off bar-1.5.
While having to watch useful programs drop out (occasionally) and be
replaced (or not) because they didn't keep up with the rest of the
ecosystem is a bit annoying, the containerise-everything alternative
means reducing the incentive for programs to keep up to date,
particularly a worry for security issues, but also generally. The
externally nice and shiny container may contain code well past its
use-by-date, this is always my worry when someone suggests containers
as a way around compatibility issues, they have their uses, but they
can also amount to sweeping problems under the carpet.

--
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk
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Exactly, yes, a huge *potential* problem. However, it is fixable with policy and changeable by exception. Just because we can have 40 versions of one thing doesn't mean Fedora will allow that. However, if there is a genuinely good reason and we can track whether that reason continues to exist over time, having the capability is a win.

langdon