On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 9:58 AM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 02:24:26PM -0400, Ben Rosser wrote:
> > I think that once the full sandboxing / portal system is in place,
> > there _will_ be a tangible reason to prefer Flatpak.
> Well, assuming that turns out to be the case, should our packaging
> guidelines eventually become "do not make RPM packages of end-user
> applications but instead make a downstream flatpak package"? I'd probably
> have mixed feelings about this, too, and it's not what the Workstation
> proposal suggests at the moment, either, but it seems to be where we're
> eventually leading here.
>
> Or, we could have tooling to turn a RPM into a flatpak, perhaps (I know
> there's a script to do this for AppImages), and use this in our build
> infrastructure?

Yes, is the direction I'm thinking. The Layered Image Build Service we
have for Docker can automatically rebuild when there are updates to
component RPMs, and it'd be nice if we could channel Flatpak through
that. Flatpak does have a little bit of awkwardness, though, since it
needs to understand nonstandard paths and locations, so it'd probably
involve rebuilding the RPMs, or at least some kind of crazy rearranging
of binaries.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of flatpaks generated from RPMs automatically by our infrastructure. (In part because this means that if I really want to, I could presumably still get the RPMs themselves instead. Presumably DNF or other tools could become configurable in this regard.) Though, if Fedora moves in that direction, it should probably be as seamless as possible from a user's perspective... e.g. "firefox" should probably launch Firefox regardless of whether or not I have the RPM or flatpak installed.

I still think we, as a distribution, should not be in the business of discouraging downstream packaging in favor of *upstream* provided flatpaks, though (which was my original objection to the idea).

Ben Rosser