On Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 08:02:35AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
I don't think so. I think RPM is a tool, a technique that can be
used
where it makes sense. It is not and should not be the center of the
universe. Today in Fedora CoreOS we ship a bit of content that comes
directly from the
https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-config git
repository without having been pointlessly put into an RPM first.
Building an intermediate RPM for content that is *only* intended to be run
as a container is just awkward and strange.
I agree. RPM makes sense at for the things it solves well, but we should
figure out how we can provide the same (or more) value in other ways too. I
know this is a blast from the past, but this was a central idea from my talk
at Flock in 2013 (
https://mattdm.org/fedora/2013next/) and I still believe
we need to get there.
I'd love to see a way to generate Flatpaks directly from our build system
without an intermediate step. Part of the justification for the current
system is an early estimate that 95% of desktop apps already packaged could
have flatpak versions without any additional work... that turned out to be not
so in practice. It was a good experiment, but we shouldn't feel stuck to it.
(Also, it was expecting a lot more improvements in modularity infrastructure
which never got resourced for reasons not worth rehashing.)
Same goes for some container content, too. Thinking about java stuff there
in particular, as well as various web-apps we package.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader