On 09/14/2015 12:04 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2015-09-14 at 12:45 +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
and much more important:

if Fedora changes to more and more recommend "pip", "gem" and "cpan" 
like installs instead RPM packages it is no longer a distribution
over the long because that would mean finally you have a core OS and
handle anything else like Microsoft or Apple - does anybody really want to
go that road?
I do. Yes. Or rather, I'd say we're already doing this, we're just not
clear that we *know* it.
....
And of course there is the brave new world of containers. There is
currently no 'official' way (so far as I'm aware) to deploy containers
on Fedora: absolutely everyone who's running Fedora as a container
host OS is working entirely outside the lines of the distribution-as-
software-provider.

So do we still believe we're not doing this already?


I take your point that an orthodox base system approach is not sufficient. What I am worried about, though, is the plethora of solutions we are considering to address that: package-specific installers, bundling, containers, Composer, secondary repos like Fusion and COPR, and I am sure I forgot something else. It just screams 'combinatorial explosion', with red carpet and a big neon saying 'combinatorial explosion' over it.

It's great that we have a discussion about which approach is best, but I think we should try to pick _something_, rather than giving up and welcoming all of them.  Of course, at the moment it's entirely unclear and premature to decide, but I believe that at least we should recognize that "there should be only one" eventually.