PackageKit Codeina replacement and Fluendo

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Jon Stanley
> 1) It creates a "endorsement" from the Fedora project
> 2) People in certain parts of the world can get the equivalent
> functionality in free software, legally.

reason 3)
By pointing users to any 3rd party vendor via default system
interactions creates an implicit expectation that the material that
users are being pointed to does in fact work as advertised and if it
does not that there is a process by which this stuff can get fixed.

It doesn't matter if we make some hand wavy argument in the textual
information that such 3rd party software is not supported...we say
that about our own software. If we point people to a 3rd party then
we'll have created an expectation that the software hosted by that 3rd
party does function with our default configuration.

Regardless of other philosophical reasoning associated with reasons 1
and 2... if people were to advocate to have Fedora client system
interactions fallback by pointing users to any software space outside
of this project's control, I would need those advocates to put forward
a reasonable pre-release testing plan and bugfix updating process that
this project could rely on with regard to those 3rd party bits.

If 3rd party software does not integrate as well, who's on the hook
for making sure it does? Surely not our releng team, because they have
no direct authority over how the software in those 3rd party vendors
is patched or packaged.  By pointing people to any particular vendor
we create an implicit expectation that the software there will
function. If it doesn't for example work with selinux out of the box
then our project's developers might not have the access necessary to
fix the problem in the 3rd party packaging.

I'm not particular thrilled with being put in a position where we are
asked to point users to things "over there" if and when those things
"over there" don't work as expected and we don't have the access to
fix them for our users.

-jef