On Mon, 8 Mar 2021 at 12:34, Mattia Verga via devel <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
I'm just wondering: what's the benefit of packaging Python noarch
projects in Fedora?

I can see the reason about packaging architecture specific packages,
since they will benefit of optimizations and security flags that Fedora
uses, but noarch packages are simply the source code that gets compiled
at runtime by the Python interpreter, aren't they?

In what way is different from installing them by pip? Does packaging
them worth spending resources (disk space, Koji cycles) and packagers time?


The needs for packaging software usually come up as the following:
1. A lot of different installed packages like say fedpkg, koji, etc will need these packages either to run or to build itself. [A lot of these are things needed to build something else.]
2. Having those as known packages quantities allows others to test and duplicate what was used to build the OS.
3. Having those as known packages allows for people to avoid certain supply chain problems where the package is 'gone/unavailable' for whatever reason.
4. Bundling the versions means that you end up with a lot of unaudited duplication for a software set which is 'central' to the building, testing, and operations of Fedora (versus nodejs, ruby, perl, lua, rust, etc).
5. When problems do occur, there is an audit trail to see when the problem noarch entered the system, how long it was there, and what was known to use it.

The above doesn't mean that the operating system needs to do so.. or that the above solve the problems listed well. However they are some of the reasons why.
 
Mattia

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