Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
This is not about forcing modules unto people. The drive comes from
the other direction: packages want to be available only as modules,
But that is exactly what I mean by "forcing modules onto people"!
and this is a work-around to allow them to be used as build
dependencies.
So this change is driven by packagers who want to use modules for
*their own packages*.
But I am speaking from a *user*'s standpoint, both end users of the package
and maintainers of dependent packages. For them, if the maintainer of
package foo decides to make package foo module-only, the maintainer *forces*
modules onto everyone wanting to use foo on their system or for their
package.
So making a package module-only is by definition forcing modules onto
people. If you claim otherwise, you have a too maintainer-centric view of
the issue and are not getting the whole picture.
I'm with you in the sense that I too fail to see practical
benefits of
modules so far. But e.g. the java-sig says it makes their life easier,
and it is their choice. The decision was made to proceed with
modularity in Fedora.
And that was a mistake! But…
Once that decision was made, we cannot forbid packagers from making
use of
the new functionality. This further step is only a natural consequence.
… that does not mean we need to go down that slippery slope. It is perfectly
possible to allow modules only with some restrictions, e.g.:
* that packages on which other packages depend at build time or at runtime
MUST NOT be module-only, or even
* that no package may ever be module-only, but modules can only be used for
non-default versions.
But if Fedora thinks it does not make sense to have modules under such
common-sense rules, then the decision to allow modules in the first place
needs to be rethought and they should be deprecated immediately (i.e., no
more modules in F30, no new modules in F29, and all module-only packages
must return to the non-modular F29 updates repository).
Kevin Kofler