Stephen Gallagher wrote:
An awful lot of people are repeating this as if it's a solution
without understanding the existing architecture. Believe it or not,
attempting to abandon default streams and go back to only non-modular
content available by default is a lot harder than it sounds (or should
be, but I noted that we're working on that in another reply elsewhere
in the thread). There is currently no path to upgrades that would get
back from the modular versions and the closest we could manage would
be to rely on the dist-upgrade distro-sync, but in that case we
*still* need to have DNF recognize that the default stream has changed
(in this case, been dropped) and handle that accordingly.
So completely disable all module support in DNF by default with some global
flag (make all the module code conditional under some new enable_modules
flag and default the flag to enable_modules = 0), then it will treat the
packages as normal packages and you only have to provide a higher EVR. All
this module processing should only happen if the user explicitly enables it.
A slightly more elaborate, but slightly harder to implement, approach would
be to let DNF simply disable modules that are enabled locally but no longer
available in the repositories, together with disabling the fedora-modular
and updates-modular repositories by default.
And the case of demodularizing packages has to be addressed sooner or later
anyway, so better address it sooner rather than later, before more and more
damage is done by maintainers moving packages to module-only without a way
back.
I started this discussion to ask the community to help us identify
the
best path *forward*. An endless barrage of "kill it off" replies is
not helpful or productive. If anyone has specific advice on how to
move forward (or, indeed, if you can figure out how to migrate back
without considerable release engineering and packager effort), that
would be productive. Just please keep in mind that we have to go to
war with the army we have, not the one we wish we had.
If you are standing in front of a cliff, moving forward is just not the
answer. Not all changes are improvements. Sometimes, you have to realize
that you made a mistake and move back before things only get worse.
The overwhelmingly negative feedback that you are getting is a clear
indication that something is wrong. You should not ignore it or summarily
file it off as luddites wanting to return to the past. There are real issues
with modules, and the Modularity WG is only offering partial workarounds
(adding more and more complexity) and no real fixes.
I have provided above 2 possible approaches to address the "migrating back"
issue.
Kevin Kofler