On 15/06/16 02:18, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Tue, 2016-06-14 at 21:46 +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
I suspect this view originates in a very Gnomeish view of the world
where upstream and the Fedora packagers are very close but I wonder
how
well it matches with situations where upstream and distros have a
more
antagonistic relationship...
It's designed for third party application developers; packages work
great for big coherent projects like GNOME and KDE that all distros
package, but they're terrible for an upstream developer trying to
distribute one piece of software to users on 20 different distros. By
making [specific, approved] upstream Flatpaks accessible in GNOME
Software, no longer does upstream have to deal with Fedora packagers
saying "you can't bundle this and that" or "your package doesn't build
with GCC 74" or "this violates or packaging guidelines," nor worry
about downstream patches causing different behavior in different
distros. Instead, Fedora just gets out of the way. The thinking is that
this will make upstreams like us more... especially since it allows
them to control the pace of updates.
I understand why upstreams want to distribute in this way sure.
I also understand why we say those things that upstream don't like and
why allowing upstreams to do whatever random nonsense crosses their mind
is potentially a bad idea.
To be fair flatpaks are not my biggest concern given that, as I
understand things, they are fairly well isolated/contained both in terms
or how they install and how they are run.
I have far more worries about third party rpms which can put files
anyway, run any scriptlets they like at install time, and generally
interfere with the system as a whole.
I'm sure we've all encountered third party rpms that make us want to
throw up because they lumped everything together in some bizarrely
chosen directory and have 5000 lines of scriptlets that seem to
represent about 10 years worth of accumulated bodges.
Just to take an example I just grabbed Google's latest chrome rpm and
checked it. Among other things it has 1051 lines of scriptlets and, for
some reason, installs a system cron job that will run as root every day.
Now sure that is probably a case that would be better suited to a
flatpak but my point is that it gives an idea of the relative quality of
upstream packaging, and in many ways it's actually probably fairly well
packaged compared to many.
Upstreams have different goals to us, and less understanding of the
right ways to do things on a given distro, so they are inclined to cargo
cult fixes based on what some not necessarily well informed person tells
them on a bug report or on whatever blog post google turns up when they
search for a solution to a problem.
The question here I think is how do we prioritise being fast vs being
correct, and your argument is that we should sacrifice some
quality/correctness in favour of speed and allowing upstreams to do
whatever is most convenient to them.
Tom
--
Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/
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