----- Original Message -----
From: "Nicolas Mailhot"
<nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net>
To: "Development discussions related to Fedora"
<devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 6, 2012 4:30:32 PM
Subject: Re: What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?
IMHO use of software collections is a symptom of a badly run
organisation
not devoting enough cycles to maintain the software it uses, and
hoping
(as in wishful thinking) no problem will go critical before the
product
they built on top of those collections is end-of-lifed
I completely fail to see how entities with that problem will manage
to
maintain the package number explosion creating software collections
will
induce.
I think those people only like software collections as long as they
are
not held accountable about the (security…) state those collections
are in,
either because someone else bears the burden of maintaining them
(typical
case in a software shop where a sysadmin got tasked with collecting
the
bits developers code against, and then gets forbidden to update them
to
avoid some work for those developers), or because no one is looking
closely at the sorry state the software collections are left in.
The long term effect of software collections is to make whatever is
built
on them irrelevant, as the more you procrastinate about updating, the
more
work it is to update, till updating becomes totally
out-of-the-question
and everyone accepts your product is going to the toilet with the
bricks
it has been built on the day they finally irredeemably break. IE
kleenex
programming (Oracle has perfected this strategy: their J2EE products
quality is often abysmal, but they only need to survive long enough
to
rack in the money needed to buy a better competitor the day those
products
find no new buyers).
Do we really want to go this way at the Fedora level? Our angle was
more
to enable a sustainable software ecosystem, that didn't need regular
cash
infusions to replace applications that became irrelevant due to lack
of
maintenance.
I couldn't have said it better. :)
Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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