ACTION: zbyszek to draft a new proposal for the 3rd party repo policy

I started working on this, but I think the some fundamentals needs to be rethought, in particular the scope. I hope to have a draft before the next meeting.

Sorry for the delay. I made a draft in a separate PR: https://pagure.io/fesco/fesco-docs/pull-request/34. Please see that ticket for an extensive explanation.

Proposal: approve https://pagure.io/fesco/fesco-docs/pull-request/34.

+1 to approve https://pagure.io/fesco/fesco-docs/pull-request/34

+1 to approve https://pagure.io/fesco/fesco-docs/pull-request/34

I didn't want to send a PR for a PR (also, I don't know how to do that in pagure). I made some edits to this update. Here's the revised file.

After two weeks, APPROVED with (+3,0,-0)

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/KRAIQZHW2ROCVFXGOSKQMVBUZWYL2FYG/

Keeping open to actually merge the PR or to incorporate changes by @dcantrell

There has been a followup in the PR. I'm removing the pending announce label, we will most likely need to vote again.

+1 LGTM

+1

I'm +1 in general, but I'd like to add one sentence added to the "Duplicates and replacements" section:

"Third-party repositories are permitted to provide non-default module streams of content present in the official repositories."

+1 from me. If the change from @sgallagh is made, consider me a +1 for that as well.

In general +1... I think the last sentence is weird: "Fedora may also define agreements with third-party maintainers." who is "Fedora" ? :) Perhaps that should be "Fedora working groups or FESCo may also..."

I'm fine with @sgallagh 's amendment as well.

In general +1... I think the last sentence is weird: "Fedora may also define agreements with third-party maintainers." who is "Fedora" ? :) Perhaps that should be "Fedora working groups or FESCo may also..."

I made that change now. That part of the text was unchanged from before, and I admit I didn't think about it at all.

"Third-party repositories are permitted to provide non-default module streams of content present in the official repositories."

Let's make the discussion of modular content a separate discussion. It is not a trivial change, and I don't want to mix it with the changes here, especially that they are very close to being merged, and opening a new area of discussion is at least going to delay that.

The policy (in previous form and in the form as amended here) puts an emphasis on avoiding problems from the third party packages replacing or conflicting with software packaged in Fedora. With delivery formats like flatpaks this is easy, the design of the delivery format helps a lot. For software packages are rpms, we have to be careful, but if a conflict occurs it should still be fairly straightforward to diagnose. With modules we have the problem that those 3rd party rpms would silently shadow distro rpms. We know from experience with our own modules that this is not always easy to figure out, and not easy to rectify once figured out. With 3rd party software delivered as modules, this could be even more complicated. I think an invitation to deliver 3rd party software as modules should at least be preceded by careful consideration.

@zbyszek I think an easy way to deal with this is make FESCo approval required for 3rd party repositories shipping modular content, default or otherwise.

So... if such a proposal comes in, let's then discuss it and figure out some specific rules. I don't want to spend time on this when it's purely hypothetical.

Well, NVIDIA converted their official RHEL driver repo to a modular repo, so it's not out of the question. But perhaps in the Fedora case it's theoretical for now.

APPROVED (+6, 0, 0) (counting the votes since the meeting one week ago where we made another call for comments.)

I'll merge the PR now and announce this along today's meeting agenda.

Announced: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/HIZ5Y6KWN6JVE7MU7W32PEPGL5QKUAI7/.

Thanks for getting this over the finish line, @zbyszek !

Thank you too. I'm glad it's over :|