Fedora Updates Its Packaging Policy To The Ire Of Some Developers

Fedora has updated its packaging policy to allow more software to be bundled in the Fedora repository, but not everyone is happy with this change.

Yesterday the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) updated the policy. The updated portion of the policy is laid out as:

All packages whose upstreams allow them to be build against system libraries must be built against system libraries.

All packages whose upstreams have no mechanism to build against system libraries must be contacted publicly about a path to supporting system libraries. If upstream refuses, this must be recorded in the spec file using a persistent mechanism to be clarified in the packaging guidelines.

All packages whose upstreams have no mechanism to build against system libraries may opt to carry bundled libraries, but if they do, they must include Provides: bundled(libname) = version in their RPM spec file.

Up to now, Fedora has been against packaging Fedora applications that explicitly bundle their own libraries rather than what's already available as Fedora system libraries.

One of the primary examples of what the up-to-now policy has blocked was preventing Chromium from being added to Fedora due to it bundling their own libraries and not making it easy to use the system-supplied libraries.

However, as you can see from the comments on this mailing list thread, not everyone is happy about the change for "lowering the quality" of Fedora, "quantity over quality", fears of potential issues, and other feelings by some.