On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 2:38 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 8:50 AM Stephen Gallagher
<sgallagh(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> I'm wary of assuming that this thread represents the whole of Fedoran opinions,
however. As we all know, it's generally the set of people who are upset that speak up
the loudest. I'm not discounting your concerns (far from it!), but if we only base
development decisions on "make sure no one is upset about it", we'd never
accomplish anything new at all. This is why when I've been sending out these emails to
discuss ideas, I've been trying to carefully describe both the use-cases and the
technical limitations (both intrinsic to the design and those that are the result of
imperfect implementation) each time. It's somewhat disheartening to hear responses
that largely boil down to "If you can't get it perfectly right, stop
trying!".
At least this Fedora packager is getting super burned out with the
number of problems caused in his day to day by the creation of
module-only software in Fedora. I've never really had a problem with
the idea of modules for alternative software, but I deeply despise the
dependency on modularity for "default" software (per modularity
parlance).
I still don't have a good grasp of what to do anymore for packaging.
I've edged away from packaging anything that involves modularity in
Fedora proper because it's just too complex for me to grok.
And as a third party packager, I really don't want to deal with
modules for "default distro" setups. How am I supposed to make my
software compatible with all of the potential module filters imposed
on me by DNF? I don't know how to deal with depending on content
existing in default modules either...
For whatever it is worth, I agree with everything Neal wrote too.
Before things are rolled out further, I'd like to see some policies
agreed upon for what modularity is and isn't allowed for in Fedora:
what are the rules for default streams, buildroot only modules,
modularizing non-leaf packages, etc. It feels like we don't or haven't
agreed on what we actually want to use modularity for *in Fedora*.
There could very well be things that modularity should support for
RHEL that don't make sense for Fedora... and I think there's fear that
this distinction isn't being made at the moment. Or that the decisions
have already been made.
It's certainly true that the loudest and most unhappy voices tend to
dominate discussions, but so far I haven't seen many people speak up
who are enthusiastic about modularity who aren't also involved in it
in some way.
Granted, that could well change over time as improvements are made-- I
think the Java Situation has left a bad taste in everyone's mouth--
but it still seems like this is a good time to reflect on the current
implementation of modularity, what its benefits are, what we want it
to do, and if it's doing what we want it to do.
Ben Rosser