Joe Orton wrote:
I find myself a bit reluctant to write this mail because the
language
others are using in this thread is fairly ugly for a technical
discussion in an open source project - about "forcing" people to develop
packages in a certain way, "teaching them a lesson" etc. Please calm it
down & have some respect for technical decisions of other developers.
I am sorry if my wording irritated you. However, I would like to point out
that…
For some people here it is clear they don't want to develop
modules and
that will always be fine. Others see a benefit (whether small or large)
from developing as modules, and that should also be fine and I want
Fedora to allow that. Allowing modules in buildroots prevents the
conflict between packagers who make different choices (e.g. non-modular
Eclipse can't use module-only Maven) so seems like a good compromise.
… this is not a complete solution, because it is taking the end users
entirely out of the equation. Allowing modules in buildroots will have no
impact on the end user.
The net result of this proposed Change for the end user is still the same as
the status quo: They have to use modules whether they want to or not, the
choice is taken away from them. And while the default stream approach tries
to hide Modularity from the users (and with this proposed Change, also from
the packagers of dependent packages), the abstraction is leaky, as
evidenced, e.g., by the libgit2 upgrade blocker.
I think it is not fair to force modules onto all users of the distribution
just because it is the technical preference of a few individual developers.
Because, in the end, it is the developers who choose to make their packages
module-only who are forcing their way onto all users (and other developers,
too). My proposal would only "force" the developers to give the choice back
to the users. So I do not see myself as being the one forcing their way onto
others. I am sorry if my suboptimal wording gave you that unfortunate
impression.
If the user wishes to use a non-default version of a package, sure,
Modularity can help them. But otherwise, modules should not be a requirement
to use the distribution. There is no technical necessity for that.
Requiring packages to have a non-modular version in the non-modular
repository does in no way preclude providing alternate versions in modules,
so I do not see how that proposal would impede developing modules if the
maintainer wishes to do that.
Kevin Kofler