Hi Bastien,
Here are some of the benefits I see of this effort as compared to simply telling users to consume Flatpaks from Flathub or independent repositories:
* Benefit to Flaptak users on all distributions: more applications are available more quickly. Some applications will be much easier to create Flatpaks of this way because of their build dependencies. For lightly maintained, older applications, building a Flatpak of an RPM within Fedora is simple and avoids creating another independent place that someone has to keep an eye on.
* Benefit to Flatpak users on all distributions: this works towards having a runtime (whether Fedora or RHEL/CentOS based) that has a long lifetime and strong security update guarantees
* Benefit to Fedora users: they can get Flatpaks and runtimes from a source they already have trust in.
* Benefit to Fedora users: this is a repository of Flaptaks we can enable by default (there are ongoing discussions of splitting up Flathub, but currently it combines both content that Fedora can point users to, and content that is problematical from a legal or Free Software point of view, all mixed together.)
* Benefit to Fedora contributors: they can work within the community and infrastructure they are already familiar with to fill gaps in the set of available Flatpaks.
* Benefit to Fedora contributors: they can make their packaging work available across distributions and distribution versions.
* Benefit to upstream: if they already have a good relationship with Fedora and their application is well maintained there, they can point users on all distributions to a Fedora Flatpak.
* Benefit to Red Hat: We build infrastructure technology and content that we can take into the RHEL context and make runtimes and Flatpaks available to our customers with the type of guarantees that we are already providing for RPM content.
LIke many things we do in Fedora, the benefit to RHEL is a big reason that we've been doing this work, and was an influence in some of decisions about how things were implemented, but I think the work does stand on its own as useful to the Fedora and Flatpak communities.
Regards,
Owen