On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 4:23 PM, Matthew Miller <mat...@fedoraproject.org> wrote: > Modularity will allowing *us* at the packaging end to separate source > and spec lifecycle from binary and artifact lifecycle. And, it will > also allow those of us working on assembling spins and more options — > for example, we can have different streams for Atomic without needing > to actually duplicate every package. (And we could do the same for KDE > or whatever other artifacts would benefit from that, if we want.) > > And that's not even with doing arbitrary branching for individual > packages. If everything works out successfully with _that_, it will > eventually make _less_ work for packagers. Right now, I have a package > which I maintain for F25, F26, Rawhide, EPEL6, and EPEL7. There's no > difference in any of the versions and no real reason to keep them > separated; in the future, I will be able to have just one branch that > goes to all of them. Or I could have a "stable" and "experimental" > branch that people could choose from regardless of the base. This can > benefit *way* more packages than simply leaf desktop applications. > > Will we get there? I don't know! It's new and different and definitely > scary. But... it's also worth trying. > > In the meantime, if you're a packager who doesn't care about any of > this, until modularity can demonstrate real success and advantages, you > can _continue_ to not care. Modules are going to be drawn from f27 (and > I expect f28) streams which will act as always, and even if Fedora > Modular Server is a success, I expect we'll also provide a minimal > install from which a traditional Fedora-based server can be built for a > good long time.
I have similar concerns and frustrations as Neal does, I think. I first want to comment that I appreciate your willingness to engage people (like Neal, and like myself) who seem frustrated with the future direction of Fedora. And also, I think modularity-- as you described it above-- is a very admirable goal. I have plenty of packages that do not really need separate versions per each Fedora release, and it would be nice to only need to maintain one branch for them. My fear is that Fedora, in the process of rolling out modularity, will get halfway to the idealized goal and then discover that it's not possible to go the rest of the way (for whatever reason), but also that it's not possible to easily roll back to a non-modular world, and we'll be stuck. Even if we don't encounter some critical design flaw, I could certainly see us learning that it's far more complex to maintain modules in practice than we think, or perhaps that it ultimately makes things more complicated for users rather than less. Now, perhaps this won't happen. Indeed, hopefully it does not. But I think the retirement of pkgdb-- which is a prerequisite for modularity-- on a short timescale in a half-baked manner (as you said) is an example of how it's all too easy *for* it to happen. Respectfully, this does not inspire confidence in how well the rollout of modularity across the entire distribution will go. Ben Rosser _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
