On Fri, Sep 7, 2018 at 2:52 AM, Robin Lee <cheeselee@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

What does it mean for 'Fedora' Flatpaks?
- Flatpaks that run on a Fedora runtime? Then, what's the benifit to
use Fedora runtime instead of freedesktop ones?
- Flatpaks that maintained by Fedora community? Then, why not
encourage people to contribute to Flathub directly?

What is meant here is "a runtime and Flatpaks built out of the Fedora RPMs on Fedora infrastructure".

Some advantages this has over building and using Flatpaks on Flathub:

- In most cases, it's easier to create a Flatpak from an existing RPM rather than creating a flatpak-builder manifest from scratch.

- We're able to reuse the Fedora updates infrastructure and automate rebuilding and releasing Flatpaks and the runtime for security or other bug fixes

- Applications with complicated build dependencies are easier to handle. Any RPM in Fedora can be used as a build-time dependency. Only run-time dependencies that aren't already in the runtime need to be rebuilt and bundled, and even there it's a mostly automatic process.

(On the other hand, for an upstream application developer who knows nothing about RPMs and specfiles and so forth, and just wants to create a Flatpak of their application, flatpak-builder and Flathub is likely more attractive than creating a Flatpak via Fedora packaging.)

It's not exclusive - you can use Flatpaks from Flathub and from this effort together - even on a non-Fedora system. And, of course, you can contribute to both Fedora and Flathub!

Owen