On Jun 14, 2016 9:33 PM, "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro@gnome.org> wrote:

On Tue, 2016-06-14 at 19:26 +0100, James Hogarth wrote:
> Does anyone in marketing or development now what the article is
> referring
> to and what's going on?

Hi,

There's an article on Ars as well. The "working with Fedora developers"
claim is probably a misunderstanding on Softpedia's part; it's not
true, and I doubt Canonical would have said that. What's going on is
that Canonical beat us to market in development... and now their
marketing folks have beat us in marketing, too. We of course have zero
plans to adopt Snappy in Fedora, and in fact multiple Fedora developers
are working on a competing solution, Flatpak [1] (formerly xdg-app),
which is also being adopted by GNOME and Endless. Until today, Snappy
was viewed as Ubuntu-specific, which is why there was so little
interest in it.

We have not considered, and need to discuss, whether to allow that
snapcore package into Fedora proper; there's a strong argument to be
made that we should accept all free software, but doing that could
undercut our Flatpak effort. If popular upstreams start distributing
snaps, then we'll probably have to support it, though.

Challenge for the marketing folks: can we get these tech journalism
sites writing about Flatpak instead? About GNOME Software's new support
for displaying and installing Flatpaks in F24? Otherwise, I see
upstreams adopting Snappy and not Flatpak.

Background info: In the Workstation working group, we're currently
planning to allow replacing RPM packages for graphical apps with
Flatpaks. We're also planning to remove Fedora packages for selected
apps that are offered as Flatpaks by upstream. For instance, if
(hypothetical) Inkscape were to offer a Flatpak download on their web
site, the Inkscape developers could request that we remove the Inkscape
Fedora package and display their Flatpak in GNOME Software instead; the
goal here is to reduce friction between upstream and downstream that
people complain about so often, while ensuring it's still very easy to
find and install software that runs reliably on Fedora. I guess we
could do the same with snaps, if they become sufficiently popular, but
it'd be quite unfortunate to support two competing desktop
containerization solutions.

Michael

[1] http://flatpak.org/
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