On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 09:07:27AM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> Because this keeps coming up, we talked about this at the Fedora
Council
> meeting today. Our goals for modularity are:
> 2. Those alternate streams should be able to have different lifecycles.
Hmm, it sounds like the Council hasn't taken into account the constraints
on lifecycle of modules that we have slowly discovered during the last
two years, constraints that are now part of FESCo-approved policy.
Essentially, modules in Fedora are only allowed to EOL at EOL of Fedora
release. And to preserve stability for users, a.k.a. following the Update
Policy, modules should only change to new major version at Fedora
releases. This is exactly the same as for "normal" rpms.
This seems appropriate for default steams, but modules should be able to
have alternate, opt-in streams which either a) update on a rolling or other
cadence or b) choose to keep building the older version across the release
boundary.
The tooling should make this clear to the users.
The lifecycle of modules in Fedora must be the same as lifecycle of
Fedora releases, so no "different lifecycle" is possible.
> 1. Users should have alternate streams of software available.
> 3. Packaging an individual stream for multiple outputs should be easier
> than before.
Those *are* useful goals, but they should not be tied to specific technology,
we should only care about the end-result.
Yes, that's true from a Council point of view.
However, I also have a pretty strong bias towards people who showed up to
do the work, and the decisions they've made. That doesn't mean we're stuck
and can't adjust -- in fact, adjusting as we've gone along is a lot of why
we're where we are now. But unless someone shows up with people-power and
funding to do it, I take kind of a skeptical view of proposals to start a
whole new approach from scratch.
Thus, please replace "Our goals for modularity are" with
"What we hope
to achieve with modularity" or even "Our goal is for users to be able to".
I don't really see a meaningful difference there.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader