Fedora's way forward

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 14:00 -0800, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:34:38 -0500, David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> 
> > Please explain why it is difficult for the user to grab 
> > 
> >  gstreamer-plugins-bad
> >  gstreamer-ffmpeg
> >  gstreamer-plugins-ugly
> 
> > Sure, now you can enumerate tons of practical reasons such as
> > discoverability and I would even agree with you.
> 
> How about a discoverability of the package name of the month?
> Gstreamer people seem to receive sadistic pleasure from renaming
> packages.

How about just going to a web page, click on a link, press OK on some
dialogs and all this stuff just get installed along with .repo files for
updates? Personally, I've been using one of the 3rd party repos that
even have a tree for Rawhide. And.. the days of such repos overwriting
Core packages seems to have passed; works for me.

I just fail to see why we can't solve this with 3rd party repositories;
in fact my personal view is that Fedora should embrace such repos and
make it almost trivial for them to provide packages and keep in sync
with the various Fedora distributions (at this point, FC4, FC5, Rawhide)
insofar that e.g. 3rd party kernel modules RPM's get rebuilt when davej
et. al. pushes a new kernel. So if I'm an IHV like e.g. NVidia I just
provide a link on my webpage and the magic happens.

Of course it would be wonderful if everything was in Core/Extras, but,
really, this will never be the case especially not for hardware drivers
as it simply takes time to push things into the upstream kernel and then
into Fedora Core.

So.. if something cares enough.. and maybe someday someone will.. they
will do the work to enable ISV's, IHV's and 3rd party repos to easily
set this up. I cannot speak for Red Hat on this, but I cannot see why we
wouldn't take patches to simplify integration. 

Heck, in the future there may even be a viable business model for some
3rd party commercial entity to provide such a service to ISV's and IHV's
at a charge.

If someone does this I predict handling out-of-distro software
(including drivers) will provide the user with a superior experience to
what you get on Windows and the Mac today.

Someone just needs to do the work. Whether the package stems from Core,
Extras or some 3rd party repo should only make a difference on whether
you need to click a link on a web page or insert a CD from the
software/hardware vendor. And discussing whether the one-time pain of
clicking a link or inserting a CD is too much work for the user is just,
IMHO, ridiculous.

    David