Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

Posted Feb 8, 2023 14:53 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks by farnz
Parent article: Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

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.