On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 6:23 AM Mikolaj Izdebski mizdebsk@redhat.com wrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 4:59 PM Miro HronĨok mhroncok@redhat.com wrote:
I've asked whether it wouldn't be in fact much easier to keep the default versions of our packages non-modular.
Others have said they are interested in this as well. A huge thread happened but it hasn't delivered an answer. Arguments were made that default modular streams are planned to deliver the exact same experience as non-modular packages, yet it was not said if it wouldn't be easier to just deliver non-modular packages for default versions.
Maybe it would be helpful to try to reformulate the question:
**What are the benefits of default modular streams over non-modular packages?**
As Petr Pisar noted earlier, default streams are designed to deliver the same user experience as ursine packages, therefore there is no *direct* advantage or disadvantage of them over ursine packages, for Fedora *users*.
Confusing and inconsistent resolution of dependency chains is a direct consequence of using modularity. These threads have pointed out others.
Default streams are modules. Building packages as modules has very significant advantages to some package maintainers. Certain maintainers (like me) can save a lot of time by building packages as modules. This *indirectly* benefits users and
Those maintainers are a small though vocal minority. Can anyone name three packages that genuinely benefit from modularity, rather than /etc/alternatives, SCL style separate deployment in /opt/. If there was always a bae installation and modules were, in fact, only an add-on, that might have been more stable.
other Fedora contributors - maintainers who can more easily build packages have more time to spend on important bugs and features affecting users, can get more involved in other Fedora activities etc.
At the cost of the time of *other* package maintainers who have to deal with the inconsistent dependency resolutions at build and deployment time. It's not, so far, proven to be a helpful technology.