Backstory:

FreeCAD has been in a terrible state in Fedora for a couple of years now and I've nearly given up on trying to maintain the package a few times now. The previous battle was with the Coin3D stack which finally got updated to Coin4 in f32 (then Rawhide). I constantly got bugs submitted that freecad was broken in f31 and my answer was, "Be patient it'll finally be fixed in Fedora 32 where the Coin3D stack is updated!". 

However, that was a lie. Unintentional, but a lie nonetheless. 

Fedora 32 releases and I'm enthusiastic that freecad will finally be *fixed*! And then I get my first BZ, now PySide2 is broken... Why?

Because Qt 5.13.x / PySide2 5.13.x is NOT compatible with Python 3.8. But instead of asking ourselves, "should we push in the VERY latest Python and hope it's ok?", we just patch the build system to accept it anyway and hope for the best. 

Qt (et all) is a pretty organized upstream, so when asked about Python 3.8 support in 5.13.x, they said, "Nope. Wait for 5.14.x." 

What good does that do me? At the time it wasn't released, and once it was only Rawhide got it. And I get why. Updating the whole Qt stack and rebuilding all the dependencies is pretty a pretty painful process.

So all that to say, we seem to be taking "Fedora First" to mean, we're going to update regardless of what it breaks. 

This is a little more ranty that I intended it to be, and no, I'm not going to go research and paste a bunch of BZ urls, this isn't about asking for help, it's more policy related.

Hell, I still have one project that all but refuses to update to Python 3!

Fortuantly a user found a github project that had the needed patches backported from 5.14.x! Fingers crossed freecad will work again for more than 5 seconds.

Now I'm being told PySide2 doesn't build with Python 3.9 pre-release. I'm not surprised! It's not even released yet. I can (and will) inform upstream. But what do you think their answer is going to be? Wait for 5.15?

Ok, rant over.

Thanks,

Richard