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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 02:20:29PM -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 2:26 AM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> > I can see further use cases where providing a MinGW toolchain will
> > benefit Fedora and F/LOSS.
> 
> The question is.. what is the appropriate size of the "toolchain" that
> we provide as part of our distribution. [...]

Your argument seems to be that either just the MinGW compiler goes in,
or everything in the world goes in, and there is no middle ground.

> [...] Paint me a bright line,

OK, as with ordinary Fedora packages, a MinGW library would only go in
if there was somebody willing to maintain it.  It's highly unlikely
that someone would be willing to maintain a MinGW cross-compile of
every library currently in Fedora (it would certainly take all hours
god gives and more to accomplish such a feat).

For libvirt the required libraries are:

 - gnutls
 - libgcrypt
 - libgpg-error
 - libxml2
 - portablexdr (*)
 - zlib

  (*) not part of Fedora at the moment

and because having libvirt on Windows is a highly desirable outcome
for us, we would be prepared to do the work either with maintainers,
or ourselves, to maintain MinGW subpackages of these packages.  If at
some point in the future we aren't able to continue that work, then as
with any other Fedora package they would eventually be removed from
Fedora by standard processes.

The same would apply on a case-by-case basis to any other library.

I should stress again that this is no different from how Fedora
packages currently get into and remain in Fedora: 'libbarquux' doesn't
get into Fedora unless there is someone willing to maintain it, and if
no one is willing to maintain it any more, then it becomes orphaned
and eventually gets removed.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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