I feel like OP missed an opportunity to title this post “Fedora Flatpaks Fall Flat”
Great article, BTW
Great article, BTW
I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with "The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build." in the end-of-life metadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since said "For the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.")
The article also doesn't answer lots of questions such as:
Note again that OBS's official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates. (I think that may also be the outcome of marking it EOL too? it seems like flatpak maybe needs to get some way to signal to users that they should uninstall an EOL package at update time, and/or inform them of a different package which replaces one they have installed.)
TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.
I can confirm, I really missed the opportunity
You can edit the title...
IT'S OVER, MAN. YOU HAVE TO LET IT GO!!!!
The issue is that they are pushing their own version of flatpaks, some of which are broken, instead of contributing to flat hub and making that the default.
This comment should be deleted soon
What is the lesson we can learn here as stated by the author of the post?
A messy situation but hopefully one some lessons can be learned from.
There is no info why packaging failed. I can't draw any obvious lesson from this post
The lesson is that Fedora Flatpak Repo needs to fuck off. It's an anti-pattern to have an obscure flatpak repo with software that is packaged differently from everything else.
The entire point of flatpaks was to have a universal packaging format that upstream devs could make themselves, and Fedora is completely undermining it.
Ah I'm glad to see the situation seems to have cooled a little.
See this comment and the three following, as well as this one and the two following. I think they can now work it out between the projects reasonably.
PS: This more fundamental proposal for Fedora Workstation that started from the OBS packaging issue is also interesting to read. It seems they are looking to make more limited / focused use of their own Flatpak remote in the future since some old assumptions regarding Flatpaks and Flathub don't hold so well anymore.
Obviously, the best solution is that the gets settled out-of-court. However, Fedora has had a long time to listen to the OBS devs' request to stop packaging broken software, so maybe they won't listen to reason.
Fedora needs to get their heads out of their asses and kill the Fedora Flatpak repo.
Totally forget that I still was in fedora's flatpak repo until the news dropped. Took the opportunity to remove and replace it with flathub.
Just gonna leave this here...
It's not that hard to actually follow XDG specifications instead of hardcoding paths.
Which flatpak itself doesn't, btw. $HOME/.var for flatpaks is hardcoded, no answer in the issue tracker so far, to the proposal of using the usual flatpak_xyz_dir variable to change the path.
Is there any merit to the claim OBS is using an end-of-life (EOL) runtime and that this is a very bad thing for security?
I think you might find this comment by one of the OBS upstream devs interesting:
https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-955899
Fedora's opinion seems to be that upgrading is always the right choice, which we disagree with.
Ugh, I'm glad people are willing to fight back against these kinds of assertions.
Regardless of who is right, facilitating and encouraging this kind of discourse is how we end up with better software for everyone.
inb4 Iceweasel
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