On Tue, Jan 7, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Tom Hughes wrote:
I'd love to find a way to directly integrate the likes of gem, npm
etc directly into our packaging rather than us having to repackage
everything by hand but I just don't see any way of doing it without
compromising what we do to the extent that we're not really doing
anything useful at all and are just shoveling out whatever nonsense
upstreams perpetrate without question.
Implicit in this is the idea that value should be captured at a secondary distribution
layer. Implicit in this is the idea that distribution forks *need* to happen. But they
don't.
In fact, everyone here can work upstream too! If e.g. someone upstream messes up
licensing, the mindset shouldn't be "oh man those upstream developers are
incompetent, let's patch it downstream".
Join upstream. Review *code* not spec files. Fix *code* not spec files. That's the
most valuable thing for FOSS - not spec files.
If there's an upstream that isn't doing the right thing (consistently) - fork the
upstream, don't fork it at the package level. That way, work can be shared across
multiple distributions.
Even ignoring others, the Red Hat ecosystem today has 3 distributions - it's simply
better to work upstream as much as possible, and avoid duplicating work across those 3
downstreams.