I think freeipa represents something of a research opportunity.
Among all the 'functional subsystem packages' out there, freeipa is the 'tallest pyramid with the widest base' I'm aware of. By that I mean it has the largest number of dependencies which themselves are also subsystems (over against libraries with little more than libc/kernel dependencies); and that in order to be considered 'up and useful' all of the subsystems contribute to the necessary 'running properly' condition. In fact many of the subsystems freeipa relies upon are themselves reliant on what you might call 'functional subsystems'.
You might argue a 'distro' or a GUI environment would be better, but that's more like a collection of shorter pyramids where the 'breakage' of one doesn't materially impact the others.
A hypothesis worth getting actual metrics on would be how often it would appear 'freeipa breaks upon install' and 'freeipa breaks upon upgrade' when installed via a stream-style release, over against 'vm' or 'docker' releases, and that over against 'lts/rhel/centos' vs fedora.
Over the coming decades, a question needs resolving-- how high a 'brick wall' is possible and sustainable (where each 'brick' is a dependency) and what can be done to make 'higher walls' more reliable? Because each subsystem represents thousands of hours of focused labor, and that packaged and made available to other developers faced with either re-creating the function or using the subsystem.
Presently we're faced with the smallest changes in a dependency corrupting a database upon 'upgrade', or some seeming trifle breaking the ui, etc.
I suppose it would lead to a 'so, then, with that, now what?' question -- and that would be really interesting as well.
So, there's a Monday morning idea. Harry Coin _______________________________________________ FreeIPA-users mailing list -- freeipa-users@lists.fedorahosted.org To unsubscribe send an email to freeipa-users-le...@lists.fedorahosted.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/freeipa-users@lists.fedorahosted.org Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
