On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 09:49:14AM +0100, Vít Ondruch wrote: > Apparently, there are two camps of packagers in Fedora/EPEL. Those who want: > 1) single version of .spec file to cover the whole Red Hat ecosystem. > 2) clean .spec file following the latest and greatest packaging practices.
Here's my take: how much impact on the world do you want to have? Are you doing this just for yourself, or to help other people? With that in mind, take a look at the relative use in the world of Fedora and EPEL: https://twitter.com/mattdm/status/936243506355621888 and considering the velociraptor's comment, my anecdotal sense is that use of NAT and proxies at large institutions using enterprise distros _probably_ makes the red EPEL line even higher. For those of you who prefer ASCII art to graphics, here's an approximation of this chart: e e e ee ee eeee eee ee eeee eeee eeee fffff fffffffffeef fffffffffff fffffffff eeeee ffffffffffff fff eeeeee eeeeeee 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Particularly in the last few years, Fedora as an OS is doing well. But use of EPEL by our downstreams is growning even more dramatically. Of course, I want Fedora OS growth, but the impact we have is _way_ beyond that, and I'd really like us to think of _Fedora_ as beyond just the base OS, too. I definitely get the point, though, about it being annoying to have to carry ancient kludges for ten years, or to not be able to take advantage of new packaging technologies until the downstreams have caught up. I don't discount the impact we have by making improvements that eventually trickle down, too — we make our downstreams better with our fast-moving development work as well as by providing a universe of additional software. We *could* decide to just focus on one at the exclusion of the other — drop EPEL and just work on the latest rolling release stuff. Or, we could say that we need to dial back the packaging improvements and make everyone focus on ecosystem compatibility. Instead, I'd like to focus effort on bringing the stuff we need to the enterprise distributions more quickly. And I think we need to figure out how to make Fedora/EPEL packages on EL without needing to promise an EL-equivalent maintenance period — that's not reasonable for many Fedora packagers. But we can make this better. Let's work with the downstreams to that. And, let's use automation to identify and correct problem areas. (Hopefully not surprisingly, this is one of my top requests for the whole Modularity effort. It should make this *easy*.) -- Matthew Miller <mat...@fedoraproject.org> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
