Package recipes

[Andy Green]

Somebody in the thread at some point said:

> Whatever. I'm in, either way.
> I've been looking for something of that magnitude as an anchor project
> in a long-term thing I'm currently conceptualising. 
> 
> You in, too? Or are you in more of a "peel me another grape" place right
> now?

I think this is a bit more complex than you may think.  For example to
be really useful, you need to be able to mix granular recipes.  So you
could take a recipe for someone's email setup from one place and someone
else's recipe for secure webserving from another.

Somehow it needs to deal with conflicts between the recipes (eg, one
recipe specifies PHP4, another PHP5) and merging different config file
contents from the different recipes (although /etc/blah.d/ is gradually
helping on that front).

If it is done right, one great thing that can fall out of it is no more
monolithic versions (or spins) of Fedora.  Just recipies you subscribe
to that specify more or less proven / aged packages from Development for
different tasks.

Unlike Fedora legacy, which was a lot of work for no reward (and was
undercut by the availability of later versions) there is no backporting,
the originator of the recipe perforce updates his recipe to use packages
that contain the fix and "publishes" it.  That's what he would do anyway
to deal with a security problem.

But don't underestimate the difficulty of specifying how this should
work in a complete way... implementing it aside.

-Andy