compat-python, Zope...

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 15.10.2008 14:57, Jeremy Katz wrote:
 > [...]

You have lots of good arguments and I agree partly or completely with 
most of them. Nevertheless I think it is the right thing to ship 
compat-python* in RPM Fusion/Livna.

Why?

In short: Well, the world sometimes is not as good as we would like it 
to be; we can try our best to fix it, but the task is really really big; 
if you nevertheless try to do it you might forget the real goal you 
aimed for in the beginning -- if you are not careful you might get 
obsoleted and irrelevant on the way.


The longer variant: We can try our best to fix things and put pressure 
on other other people to fix their stuff -- the plone and zope 
developers in this case. But we can't force people to do what we want 
(which is a good thing in the end), as this whole game is about *free* 
software; thus the only way to definitely get what we want would be to 
do it ourselves.

That is a whole lot of work that afaics nobody from us is willing to do. 
Thus trying to increase the pressure by not shipping plone and zope at 
all seems like a good idea. But by doing that we bring ourselves 
(Fedora) in a worse situation. And free software/Linux is about choice 
-- if you don't get what you want from somebody (from Fedora) you can 
always (a) find somebody else that gives you want you want or (b) do it 
yourself.

The (a) case afaics is quite easy way for a lot of people and afaics one 
of the reasons why Ubuntu is so popular these days, because they just 
give people what they ask for (including proprietary drivers (which is 
bad, but that is another topic)). Hence if we in the plone/zope case and 
hundred similar cases do what is best, but not what users want, then 
Fedora and Red Hat in the end might lose completely. They might become a 
niche distribution that is only worth a short paragraph in "the history 
of Open-Source from 1983 -- 2083"; others will get all the glory.


Note note! With above I don't mean that we should throw away all or 
ideals and start including proprietary drivers in Linux. But we could 
work together with the other big distributors to increase the pressure 
on the plone and zope developers -- because if the main and popular ones 
together say "we'll drop python 2.4 on distributions released after 
20081231" then for sure something will happen.

And yes, sure, there is still the freedom and the possibility that 
another Ubuntu then arises from nowhere and just does things the users 
want even if those things are worse for the ecosystem; but that's not 
that easy to do.

Cu
knurd