[Fedora-packaging] Re: supporting closed source operating systems?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> So unless you wish to provide a detailed plan -- not hand-wavey stuff
> about Fedora providing 'extra infrastructure' or 'teaching RPM to
> understand' things -- I really don't think I can sensibly continue
> this discussion.

I plan to talk to more people about whether we can set this up in the
same was as a secondary arch works.  Failing that however... running
this as an addon repo is possible with known technical knowledge. EPEL
is an existing implementation of an addon repository... it just
doesn't target Fedora as its base repo. But we certainly know how to
do an addon repo this way that does not invoke any new tricks.

The question main question remains, what's a reasonable way to handle
the inclusion of cross-compiled libraries into the project. I don't
think I've seen consensus expressed.  There is a consensus that the
immediate aim of building libvirt related cross compiled libraries has
significant value, but its not clear what we want to do beyond that.

If we end up deciding that the dlls are generally not appropriate in
the main repository (and that is something I plan to discuss more at
tomorrow's board meeting) than we can certainly implement the
technical details to open a mingw addon repo constructed like EPEL..
if we want to allow it at all.

We don't have existing policy with regard to cross-compiling because
its a new capability with the introduction of the mingw tool into are
distro. But just because the tool exists, does not mean packaging and
distributing binaries built with it makes sense for the distribution
nor for the project in a broader sense. I would hope that no
subpackages with mingw built payloads will find their way into rawhide
until we have a defensible policy statement in place that sets the
bounds on what we really want to see that we can point to as more
people look to replicate what you are doing with the libvirt
libraries.  Holding off on their introduction, will suck marginally
less than if we put a handful of libs in and then the 6 months from
now we end up deciding on a policy which does not allow them in at
all.

-jef