Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

Posted Feb 8, 2023 11:07 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks by jhoblitt
Parent article: Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

The people who enjoy and are good at building maintainable systems (inc. packaging) from available software are often a very different set to the people who enjoy and are good at building some specific bit of software in some specific problem space. Indeed, software engineers who may be extremely expert in writing code in some problem domain may suck at the systems side.

Then in the Linux world there is the issue that there are many many different kinds of systems, and a plethora of deployment options. Upstreams just can't keep up.

Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

Posted Feb 8, 2023 14:26 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

And there's a "holy grail" being chased here - can we divert the people who build maintainable systems into doing it upstream, as opposed to integrating pieces downstream?

To choose a random example, if you install the Linux kernel from the Debian archives, you get a version with over 100 patches applied atop the upstream release. Some of those are specific to Debian policy, and thus fair enough, but others are about making the kernel a better part of a maintainable system; those patches should be upstream. For example, there's 6 patches to firmware loading; one is fair enough as a downstream patch (it changes the kernel to point to Debian documentation on firmware), but the other 5 are meant to be improvements to firmware loading. There's another two that set kernel taint if you use known-buggy features - this is something that probably belongs upstream, too (albeit maybe not in the form that Debian has it).

That's at least 7 of the hundred-odd patches Debian carries to a single piece of software that are relevant to building the software into a maintainable system rather than to Debian-specific changes, and that therefore would be beneficial to have upstream, helping everyone trying to use the Linux kernel as a component in a maintainable system, as opposed to downstream, only benefiting people trying to use Debian as a component in a maintainable system.

Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

Posted Feb 8, 2023 14:53 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem those people would then be split over thousands of different upstream projects. Projects with dominant developers with wildly differing attitudes to systems work. The community of system builders would be splintered, with much weaker communities dedicated to systems issues.

Unless you mean retain the 'system' communities of distros, and encourage them to upstream more work. That I would agree with. Having been an upstream, it was actually frustrating how /little/ the distro package maintainers would communicate with upstream and how rarely they tried to upstream their changes and ancillary packaging work.

Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

Posted Feb 8, 2023 15:33 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

I do mean the second paragraph; yes, there are changes that distros make that are distro-specific - no upstream wants a patch that links to Fedora-specific documentation, for example - but having the work needed to make a given piece of software part of a maintainable system living in N different distro patchsets along with distro-specific changes is duplication.

And that duplication becomes waste when you get two people who would happily improve each other's implementations of a change instead working from scratch because neither of them has submitted their version to a shared location, and thus they don't know that there's a collaboration possible.

Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

Posted Feb 10, 2023 6:14 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

One could instead upstream a patch to add a build config option to link to distro docs. Or upstream the docs too and link to that instead.