Well, I agree completely that solving the issue of installing -devel packages is not enough to make Fedora suitable for developers; but it is certainly needed. However, it would be even better if Fedora can be a great general purpose development platform supporting development for other targets such as RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu and even Windows (using mingw toolchain + wine, and then maybe virtual environments/remote access to run/test/debug on real Windows OS); which could expand to development for embedded devices/OSes like Android. But, IMHO, support for none of these should be more important than native Fedora development; specially since targeting OSes like RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu LTS is usually important for developers for commercial software. Someone who is developing free(open source) software usually prefers to use 'latest and greatest', for which usually Fedora and it's -devel packages are one of the best things available out there. And I think free software developers should be top priority for Fedora compared to others. There is nothing wrong with supporting others, but the "main" target developers should be free software developers, and they are less likely to need using mock or RHEL system libraries.Hedayat Vatankhah (hedayat.fwd@gmail.com) said:/*Bill Nottingham <notting@splat.cc>*/ wrote on Tue, 6 Jan 2015 11:39:27 -0500:<...> - Even searching for -devel packages implies a "target == host" build sensibility that is relevant mostly to those developing Fedora, and not to most of those developers that I run into on a day-to-day basis (and likely not the developers we're targeting.) They're interested in using mock along with system libraries for RHEL/CentOS, using pip/npm/rubygems, etc.So you mean that Fedora target developers are either using dynamic languages, or they develop native software for RHEL/CentOS?! So you believe that "target == rhel/centos"? And native software developers for *modern* distros are not targets? This is really offending. RHEL/CentOS themselves should mainly target their developers. I guess that most of the developers you run into are working for RedHat.... Not at Red Hat now, but what I'm saying is that the developers I interact with are targeting mainly Ubuntu LTS and CentOS/RHEL, even if their devel platform is Fedora. It goes back to uses of Fedora in production - while Fedora Server certainly wants to change this, most all of the *deployed* server systems that people are targeting for their code aren't Fedora. Once you assume that you want to support the use case of developers using Fedora to develop for things that aren't Fedora, I just feel that worrying about a package tool for installing -devel packages pales in trying to streamline the workflows the developers needs around using things like mock and jenkins as build tools, and test environments that aren't even local to the machine at all, whether they involve virtualization, containers, or remote cloud services.
Bill