> 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.
This seems to happen for often with 3rd party rpm. I have seen the same
on the slack rpm as well as the vivaldi browser rpm (they use all the same cron
job),
which basically checks if the repo file for the tool is under /etc/yum.repos.d
and if it is missing because you deleted it (aka moved it to disabled) it will
be daily recreated. Might be "great" for a non technical user, however if you
administrate several machines and want to have control over the updates to
apply,
that is really annoying.
>
> 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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