On Mon, 2023-06-05 at 19:51 +0200, Roberto Ragusa wrote: > On 6/5/23 19:13, Demi Marie Obenour wrote: > > > Are you willing to do the packaging work? Asking upstream to create > > packages for every distribution is not reasonable. > > I would never want upstream to do packaging, as experience teaches, > they would certainly do it wrong. > Packaging and integration is a job for the distribution; it is their > added value. Otherwise, what's the meaning of a distribution, if > the system is composed by a minimal booting image on which you > add upstream generated blobs?
This is really the heart of the question, and it's an interesting one. The idea that the distribution's job is to package up everything you might possibly want to use on your system is a very old one that goes back to the days before having an internet connection was the norm, let alone having several hundred megabits a second on tap at all times. It's a good model that has served us well for a long time and helped us produce something which a lot of people like and enjoy using, which is a great thing. But it's also a model that's showing stress in several ways, and which we can feasibly re-evaluate. Here are some of them that I can think of: 1. There's a lot more software out there. Here's absolutely everything in the first combined Fedora release (after the core/extras split ended): https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/x86_64/os/Fedora/ there are, by my count, 9330 binary packages there. That's a lot! But, per https://github.com/asamalik/counting-fedora-packages , even in 2019 we had 49,464 binary packages, and probably the number has gone up further since then. We're now packaging 5x as much stuff as we did in the olde days. Yet, arguably, it's *less* likely than it was in the Fedora 7 days that you can find everything you actually need in the distribution repository. So, to me, that's one indication of strain in the model. 2. There's less buy-in to the distribution model throughout the F/OSS ecosystem. This is indicated by the existence of flatpaks and snaps, and upstreams which indicate a preference for those. It's also indicated by the existence and popularity of non-distribution software repositories (often tied to languages): pypi, rubygems and so on (and, again, upstreams which express no interest in supporting the downstream distribution model). 3. The model is less directly in the interests of our corporate sponsor. Red Hat's business model and goals have changed quite a lot since the olde days. Even after the RHL -> RHEL/Fedora split that created Fedora, RH was fundamentally still in the "everything- distribution business". RH had a clear direct interest in Fedora being an everything-distribution, because RHEL needed to be one too. That was what customers were buying, though possibly with a slightly different focus on what they actually wanted to do with it than Fedora users, and RHEL was more or less the only thing Red Hat sold. Nowadays, the picture is more complicated. RHEL is still a huge business for Red Hat, but it has other lines of business too. RHEL has also been going more aggressively down the "not an everything-distribution any more" path than Fedora has. RHEL these days does not have anything like as much stuff in it as Fedora does, and RHEL customers - AIUI - are increasingly less likely than before to be buying an everything-OS for traditional computers, and increasingly more likely to be doing something more complicated and hybrid than that. The case in point is a pretty solid example of that: it is fairly inarguable that it's less directly important to RH that Fedora contains an RPM-packaged traditional office suite in 2023 than it was in 2007. This is a complicated reality to navigate, but it *is* a reality, and it's one we're gonna have to figure out. Fedora is still immensely valuable to Red Hat, but it's not necessarily immensely valuable to Red Hat *as an everything-distribution* (disclaimer: this is my personal interpretation, not RH policy, I'm not a person who sets RH policy - ask Matt or Josh for that :>). So what does that mean to us as Fedora? Does it mean we need to work out a different way to be an everything-distribution, or does it mean we need to figure out a different thing to be? I don't think RH wants to or can dictate the outcome of that discussion, but at the same time, we have to recognize RH does not have the same motivation to sponsor Fedora maintenance of every possible thing you can deploy on a computer to the same extent as it did in the past. > Sorry, but the common "why do not do it yourself?" objection is not > the correct way to address my point. As a "consumer" (even if, > not paying) I am just expressing my idea about what I would like or not. > The "producers" (Fedora/RH) can take note, or ignore the feedback. > Their luck will, at the end of the day, depend on the merit of > their choices. Yup, and this is totally fair. (Although note that this is the devel list, so arguably it's kinda expected that discussions here happen with our Fedora Contributor hats on, not our Fedora User hats on). As a user, if Fedora's nature changes, it's totally reasonable to re- evaluate if Fedora is the thing you want to use any more, and as Fedora developers we should keep that in mind when having discussions and making decisions like this. -- Adam Williamson (he/him/his) Fedora QA Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @ad...@fosstodon.org https://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.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.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
