On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 12:01:41PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
To build everything from source yourself and not to package other parties binaries, is one of the foundations of an open source distro, such as Fedora.
Okay.
In thinking about this part a bit more: I don't think that in itself is a foundation, or should be. That's an implementation. The foundational principle is that users should be confident that the binaries they receive are built from a particular open codebase with a known, replicable recipe. We do that in Fedora with our rigorous central build system. In Debian, they're working on addressing the same problem by making reproducable builds (so it doesn't matter so much who happens to have made the build you have or where it was done). I don't think the Debian approach is fundamentally counter to open source or free software principles.
Again, though, this drifts from the conversation at hand, because I'm explicitly talking about Fedora-built packages. And it certainly seems completely irrelevant to PREFIX=/usr vs PREFIX=/app vs PREFIX=/opt/fedora/apps/<appname>.