The hard problems with Collections: (Was: tuxracer & chromium move to Extras_

[Tim Daly]

Jeff,

Your three items would clearly be tasks for the various maintainers.

I'm a little puzzled by your third task where you write:

> 3)making sure that the C continuum install media sets ALL come with
> tools that understand how to use Core and Extras to get updates AND
> additional software, not just from the internet but also from media.

First, you're still maintaining the concept of Core and Extras.
That's gone. 

> If Core+Extras makes up the full range of packages and the other media
> sets in the continuum are just different mixes of all the things that
> are available in the Fedora repos, making sure vendors/lugs can
> continue to offer additional software media sets(not necessarily
> bootable media) has to be a requirement.

Second, why would vendors care? The maintainer concept is "downstream".

For instance, I have an interest in a platform that supports computational
mathematics. So I'm volunteered as the CA maintainer. My job is to define,
tag, configure, test, and maintain a CA distribution. (See Quantian at
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html). This is a fully configured
system that specializes in computational mathematics packages.

In any current world the computer algebra packages would be assigned
to "extras" and would not even likely fit into the standard install
menu anywhere. In fact, they're not likely to install without work.

In the "maintainer world", the standard install menu could include
the tag install lists maintained by special interests. Thus, a
"computational mathematics" install item would install all of the
items that are included in Quantian plus any system tools and libraries
needed to support the goal. Since a Quantian-like install is KDE based
then KDE would be implied.

Lugs could have their own maintainers (the NYLUG branch).
KDE and GNOME could have their own maintainers.

Bugzilla could be searched by maintainer tags.

In fact, the "Core" maintainer would have absolute authority about
what to include. And other maintainers would have much more weight
about pushing something into Core since they can determine what is
common between their branches.

The Linus of the maintainer world only deals with maintainers.
He has the job of making sure that there are build tools that
respect the tags, tools to handle tag-list installs, etc.

The current Core+Extras cannot satisfy any possible subset of users.
Since "advocacy is volunteering" we can make complaints work for us.
If you want a specialized build that includes tuxracer because you
teach a newbie class then either contact the current "newbie" maintainer
or become the "newbie" maintainer. Since maintaining a distribution is
a lot of hard work there will be very few people who will step up to the
task of being a maintainer. This works quite well in the linux build
process and is clearly socially acceptable. Why not use it here?

Tim