supporting closed source operating systems?

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
> So unless you wish to provide a detailed plan -- not hand-wavey stuff
> about Fedora providing 'extra infrastructure' or 'teaching RPM to
> understand' things -- I really don't think I can sensibly continue
> this discussion.

I plan to talk to more people about whether we can set this up in the
same was as a secondary arch works. Failing that however... running
this as an addon repo is possible with known technical knowledge. EPEL
is an existing implementation of an addon repository... it just
doesn't target Fedora as its base repo. But we certainly know how to
do an addon repo this way that does not invoke any new tricks.

The question main question remains, what's a reasonable way to handle
the inclusion of cross-compiled libraries into the project. I don't
think I've seen consensus expressed. There is a consensus that the
immediate aim of building libvirt related cross compiled libraries has
significant value, but its not clear what we want to do beyond that.

If we end up deciding that the dlls are generally not appropriate in
the main repository (and that is something I plan to discuss more at
tomorrow's board meeting) than we can certainly implement the
technical details to open a mingw addon repo constructed like EPEL..
if we want to allow it at all.

We don't have existing policy with regard to cross-compiling because
its a new capability with the introduction of the mingw tool into are
distro. But just because the tool exists, does not mean packaging and
distributing binaries built with it makes sense for the distribution
nor for the project in a broader sense. I would hope that no
subpackages with mingw built payloads will find their way into rawhide
until we have a defensible policy statement in place that sets the
bounds on what we really want to see that we can point to as more
people look to replicate what you are doing with the libvirt
libraries. Holding off on their introduction, will suck marginally
less than if we put a handful of libs in and then the 6 months from
now we end up deciding on a policy which does not allow them in at
all.

-jef

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seth vidal wrote:

On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 12:48 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:

On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 19:30 +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:


I think this is a rephrasing of Jeff's brigth line that he seeks to
draw and wants to know what it will include and what not.

Thanks for this post, for me it did a good job of separating the
technical from $other considerations.

The Fedora brand is a Linux brand. It makes sense to have some
Microsoft Windows stuff where it supports that story, such as tools to
assist migration ... to Linux. The libvirt pieces seem, to me, to be a
good enough fit and belong on this side of the bright line.

But we need to make it clear that we are not going to morph Fedora into
being some super-meta-FLOSS thing. So, to me, the productivity apps
belong on the other side of the bright line. If we want to be involved
in helping people switch from Microsoft Windows by supporting
productivity FLOSS stacks that runs on that OS, it should be under a
brand other than Fedora. Such as "Mozilla". ;-D



Thanks Karsten. I agree with the above.

-sv


Agreed also. Well said.

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On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 14:08 +0200, Harald Hoyer wrote:
> seth vidal wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 12:48 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> >> On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 19:30 +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:
> >>
> >>> I think this is a rephrasing of Jeff's brigth line that he seeks to
> >>> draw and wants to know what it will include and what not.
> >> Thanks for this post, for me it did a good job of separating the
> >> technical from $other considerations.
> >>
> >> The Fedora brand is a Linux brand. It makes sense to have some
> >> Microsoft Windows stuff where it supports that story, such as tools to
> >> assist migration ... to Linux. The libvirt pieces seem, to me, to be a
> >> good enough fit and belong on this side of the bright line.
> >>
> >> But we need to make it clear that we are not going to morph Fedora into
> >> being some super-meta-FLOSS thing. So, to me, the productivity apps
> >> belong on the other side of the bright line. If we want to be involved
> >> in helping people switch from Microsoft Windows by supporting
> >> productivity FLOSS stacks that runs on that OS, it should be under a
> >> brand other than Fedora. Such as "Mozilla". ;-D
> >>
> >
> > Thanks Karsten. I agree with the above.
> >
> > -sv
>
> Agreed also. Well said.

And in actuality that project (productivity for non-free OS) already
exists:

http://releases.theopencd.org/latest/

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On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 08:53:10AM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> And in actuality that project (productivity for non-free OS) already
> exists:
>
> http://releases.theopencd.org/latest/

You probably mean opendisk, opencd is out of development since a
couple of years.
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On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 15:59 +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 08:53:10AM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > And in actuality that project (productivity for non-free OS) already
> > exists:
> >
> > http://releases.theopencd.org/latest/
>
> You probably mean opendisk, opencd is out of development since a
> couple of years.

Sorry, yes. I followed a bad link from the SFD site. The right one is:
http://www.theopendisc.com/

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On Jul 13, 2008, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm@ATrpms.net> wrote:

> So the issue is a political one, not a technical one. Supporting
> libvirt for running Fedora under Windows is one thing, supporting
> increased productivity on Windows another.

FTR, if we were to pursue the latter, I think it might make more
sense, at least from my perception of Red Hat's perspective, to join
forces with Cygwin, maybe even bring it into the Fedora
brand/umbrella.

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On Jul 13, 2008, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm@ATrpms.net> wrote:

> So the issue is a political one, not a technical one. Supporting
> libvirt for running Fedora under Windows is one thing, supporting
> increased productivity on Windows another.

FTR, if we were to pursue the latter, I think it might make more
sense, at least from my perception of Red Hat's perspective, to join
forces with Cygwin, maybe even bring it into the Fedora
brand/umbrella.

--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}

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