On Thu, 2019-10-17 at 08:08 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
One of the (often un- or misinformed) major arguments people keep
using against Modularity is "it makes packaging harder!". This is one
place where it makes things *much* easier on the packagers. It's a
clear reduction in complexity.
I tried to maintain a package I have, rpick, as a module, and I found
it to be difficult. In order to package the module version of rpick, I
had to write a yaml file that listed hashes of every dependency of
rpick, and every dependency of those dependencies, and their
dependencies, and so on. This file:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/modules/rpick/blob/latest/f/rpick.yaml
I also maintain another Rust package, yubibomb, which is just a normal
spec file:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust-yubibomb/blob/master/f/rust-yubib...
I've heard it claimed that there is something specific to Rust here,
but to be honest the explanation of that was over my head. I have also
heard it claimed that Modularity was specifically supposed to help with
Rust packaging, but I haven't personally felt like it was helpful due
to the yaml file.
I'm sure my information is out of touch, but I'm sharing my experience
as someone who doesn't have a lot of time to go learn something new -
my reaction is that it's easier to maintain the "traditional" version.
My other reaction is that other distributions have solved the "too
fast, too slow" problem in simpler ways, as I wrote about elsewhere on
this thread, and I am curious why we didn't adopt their solutions (or
at least use them to guide ourselves). I've not packaged for Nix
before, but I have packaged for rPath and for Gentoo and I found their
solutions to be easy and natural.