Definitive no to LG U+ cross-distro package support - the test is whether we would ship it down the middle for everyone

Situation

LG U+ wants to run DNF update on RHEL servers pointed only at CIQ/Rocky repos, which touches bootloader packages and breaks the system on reboot. They rejected the exclude-packages workaround. In the LG - Next Steps meeting Peter refused to let the discussion be about whether the ask is a bug or whether it closes the deal, and reframed it to a single question for Justin: is this something we would do down the middle for everybody, or is it one-off work for LG. Justin answered we cannot support it. Peter then gave the definitive verdict: no, this is not something CIQ Engineering is going to support. He posted the same conclusion in the temp-lg channel after aligning with Bjorn, and handed customer messaging to Bjorn with Tommy and Art.

Reasoning

Peter refuses to spend mainline engineering on work that only ever serves one customer. His stated criterion is down-the-middle applicability, not deal value - he explicitly cut off Brady when Brady framed it as whether it drives additional deals. The deeper argument is capacity allocation: almost all engineering time goes to the customers CIQ did something weird and one-off for, and none goes to RLC AI. Growing to board-level scale requires forcing the customer base onto the truck rather than forking engineering per customer. He connected this to Greg wanting customers to love CIQ and reframed it - the way to have the most customers love you is sometimes to tell a prospect they should not be a customer.

Additional Context

Multi-week Slack drag-out preceded this. Sales had told LG this should work. Peter also noted the same argument likely applies to Citadel and Jump kernel requests, and said he had made that argument about Citadel in the last few days.

Observed Evidence

Three independent sources within four hours: the pre-call DM to Ryan stating the criterion, the Fathom transcript delivering the verdict, and the post-call channel summary aligning with Bjorn. Peter opened the meeting by installing the criterion before any technical discussion happened.

Matching Patterns

Confidence Breakdown

Reasoning Depth Analysis