The argument about Qt maintenance and the original topic are kinda orthogonal. Even in the same messages where he's criticizing obs upstream's handling of qt, mcatanzaro is still saying he wants to demote fedora flatpaks, which is what obs upstream wants - https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541... . the start of that comment is debating the Qt EOL thing. The end of the comment says "I agree with this argument. Fedora Flatpaks have had their chance but have not been successful. I'd say it's time to move on. Based on our discussion so far, I think Workstation Working Group does not want to tell Fedora developers to stop packaging things, but perhaps we can exclude the Fedora Flatpak repo from the default software sources and require that users enable it manually if they really want it."
The thing about complaints being "minimized and ignored" really isn't true. There is a gigantic thread that's a direct response to their complaints: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463
yes, it recently got unfortunately heated with the whole "whose idea about what to do with Qt is better" argument, but the whole way through that ticket - which was filed 23 days ago, and has had active discussion going that whole time, including being the main topic at multiple workstation WG meetings - it's been pretty clear that the outcome is likely to involve Fedora flatpaks being demoted. The very first post is a proposal - by a key member of the workstation WG - to move flathub ahead of Fedora flatpaks in the precedence order. Consistently through the discussion, catanzaro and other workstation WG members have been supporting that idea, with a lot of discussion and argument about the details, as you always get in F/OSS projects. we do all the sausage factory stuff in the open, that's the point.
it's not exactly a case of 'lost their original vision'. Fedora is generally a fairly permissive project; we let maintainers do stuff. Since the mechanism to build Fedora flatpaks was needed (for the bundled flatpaks for Silverblue), it was normal - in Fedora terms - to say hey, let's just let maintainers use to it build flatpaks of any Fedora package, if they want to.
The obs-studio Fedora flatpak exists because the maintainer (yselkowitz) decided to make one. Ditto the few hundred others that exist - https://src.fedoraproject.org/group/flatpak-sig . Some of those are dupes of flathub, some aren't. Of the ones that are dupes, in some cases the flathub build is 'official', in other cases it isn't.
and yeah, yselkowitz created a lot of them, most of which are very simple - it's not really a lot of work to create a flatpak when there's an existing package, the definitions for most of them look like https://src.fedoraproject.org/flatpaks/bless/blob/stable/f/c... . Kinda the point of Fedora flatpaks is that you get a lot of the work done 'for free' in the package build.
I don't know why he decided to create all of those, maybe the idea was to try and create a critical mass of stuff so it would be kinda viable to get all your software from Fedora flatpak repos the way you can get all your software from Fedora RPM repos, if you want to.
> it's not exactly a case of 'lost their original vision'.
Considering that one person that says that he worked at the beginning of the project writes that the original idea wasn't to compete with flathub and given the current state of affairs I would argue that the project today doesn't have the original vision anymore.
As for creating a ton of projects, today with LLMs I'm pretty sure that I can write code that scrapes github repos for installation instructions and use it to create thousands of packages for everything that can run in Linux, doesn't mean that I should because there would be no quality control at all.
It is a noble idea to create packages to help create critical mass, but even with simple packages, seven hundred are more than anyone can use specially when we're talking about software that most likely have a GUI, and if you never really use most of the packages that you create you are bound to create these issues with QA.
All of that could be avoided (or minimized) if the fedora project created two flatpak repos, one for core software and one for contrib software, but that probably would be clear competition to flathub and probably be mostly ignored.
OP here. Thanks for the interesting discussion, everyone! There's some really great posts in here. I really liked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879141 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884730 especially; that dilemma of not wanting to spend all your time sysadminning things (I've got a phone, four servers, a desktop, two laptops, a router, an HTPC and god knows how many little trinkets to take care of) yet also knowing too much to be OK with just telling Google or Apple to take care of it all (assuming a certain ideology) is a big part of this, I think. (Full disclosure: after getting that post out of my system I ordered a new laptop and spent half of this weekend planning a bunch of changes to my mail server...)
I also really liked the wider culture comments, especially https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879035 , but I wanna emphasize something I wrote in the comments on my blog: this is a very personal post. It's just about how I feel, and I don't think how I feel is 'right'. I think there's actually an awful lot of really interesting stuff happening in all the spaces I don't personally care about - new video platforms and VR and all of that. I'm self-aware enough to realize that part of this is just me wanting the kids off of my lawn. But since it's my blog, I can wave my stick at them as much as I like ;) But I wouldn't want to claim that just because I'm okay with what I know, none of this stuff has value, as a lot of it does.
Finally, just to note that when I wrote that I still like my job, I meant it! The post wasn't meant as a cri du coeur, exactly. I'm actually perfectly fine with this stuff. It doesn't keep me awake at nights. I just do my job, and use the tech I actually want and find useful, and forget about the rest of it. I just wanted to write it down, I guess.
Oh, and since 'guess my age' seems to have become a popular game...I'm 34. :)
