If there's one thing you can always count on in the Linux world it's that packaging can be a nightmare. The OBS Studio team are not happy with the Fedora folks due to Flatpak problems and threatened legal action.
  • @xylogx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    104•10 months ago

    I feel like OP missed an opportunity to title this post “Fedora Flatpaks Fall Flat”

    Great article, BTW

    • Arthur BesseM
      25•10 months ago

      Great article, BTW

      I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with “The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build.” in the end-of-life metadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since said “For the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.”)

      The article also doesn’t answer lots of questions such as:

      • Why is the official OBS flatpak using an EOL’d runtime?
      • Why did Fedora bother to maintain both their own flatpak and an RPM package of OBS?
      • What (and why) are the problems (or missing functionality) in the Fedora Flatpak, anyway? (there is some discussion of that here… but it’s still not clear to me)
      • What is the expected user experience going to be for users who have the Fedora flatpak installed, now that it is marked EOL? Will it be obvious to them that they can/should use the flathub version, or will the EOL’d package in the Fedora flatpak repo continue to “outweigh” it?

      Note again that OBS’s official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates. (I think that may also be the outcome of marking it EOL too? it seems like flatpak maybe needs to get some way to signal to users that they should uninstall an EOL package at update time, and/or inform them of a different package which replaces one they have installed.)

      TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.

  • @non_burglar@lemmy.world
    65•10 months ago

    The issue is that they are pushing their own version of flatpaks, some of which are broken, instead of contributing to flat hub and making that the default.

    • JohnEnglish
      46•2 months ago

      This comment should be deleted soon

      • @GrundlButter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        24•10 months ago

        That honestly doesn’t sound like a bad mission, but it seems like there’s a couple other requirements they should impose on their mission and then there wouldn’t be any controversy.

        They should require that their package works as well as the upstream, and, in the even that it doesn’t, they need to be very blatant and open that this is a downstream package, and support for it will only be provided by Fedora Flatpaks, and that you may have better results with the official packages.

        The primary issues in this case is that it doesn’t work, and it’s not been clear to users who to ask for help.

    • @just_another_person@lemmy.world
      -20•10 months ago

      I’m sorry, but you’ve completely missed either the point, or how it works.

      Flathub is really the problem here for not properly verifying package owners/maintainers and allowing them to moderate other versions of their work.

      There honestly just needs to finally be a way to sort official packages from community packages. Right now it’s a mess. Fedora should just take theirs down.

  • @Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
    28•10 months ago

    Ah I’m glad to see the situation seems to have cooled a little.

    See this comment and the three following, as well as this one and the two following. I think they can now work it out between the projects reasonably.

    PS: This more fundamental proposal for Fedora Workstation that started from the OBS packaging issue is also interesting to read. It seems they are looking to make more limited / focused use of their own Flatpak remote in the future since some old assumptions regarding Flatpaks and Flathub don’t hold so well anymore.

  • trevor (he/they)English
    12•10 months ago

    Obviously, the best solution is that the gets settled out-of-court. However, Fedora has had a long time to listen to the OBS devs’ request to stop packaging broken software, so maybe they won’t listen to reason.

    Fedora needs to get their heads out of their asses and kill the Fedora Flatpak repo.

  • Peripatos
    6•10 months ago

    Totally forget that I still was in fedora’s flatpak repo until the news dropped. Took the opportunity to remove and replace it with flathub.

    • @MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
      5•10 months ago

      It’s not that hard to actually follow XDG specifications instead of hardcoding paths.

      Which flatpak itself doesn’t, btw. $HOME/.var for flatpaks is hardcoded, no answer in the issue tracker so far, to the proposal of using the usual flatpak_xyz_dir variable to change the path.

  • @tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5•10 months ago

    Is there any merit to the claim OBS is using an end-of-life (EOL) runtime and that this is a very bad thing for security?

  • @gi1242@lemmy.world
    -12•10 months ago

    lol. so I guess fedora is pushing flatpacks now? I know Ubuntu was pushing snap, so I guess fedora followed suite with a different standard. yay.

    thankfully arch isn’t getting into this nonsense

    • Coolcoder360
      30•10 months ago

      Worse than that, the issue the article states isn’t that it’s a flat pack, it’s that fedora is pushing their rebuilt flat pack of obs that’s buggy instead of the official obs one from flat hub that works, and then the obs project is getting bug reports for a third party distribution that’s broken.

      Because fedora isn’t just pushing flat packs, they’re pushing made by fedora versions of them instead of the official builds from the maintainers.

      • @commander@lemmings.worldEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        Great explanation.

        If I were the OBS devs, I’d make a clear indication on their website when reporting bugs that the fedora version of OBS is unsupported for, well, the reasons they don’t support it.

        It seems way more effective than threatening legal repercussions.

    • @BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11•10 months ago

      It doesn’t mean they are pushing flatpaks, but rather for whatever reason they decided to package their own flatpaks.

      Flatpak can support different repos, so of course fedora can host its own. The strange bit is why bother repackaging and hosting software that is already packaged by the project itself on flathub?

      One argument might me the security risk of poorly packaged flatpaks relying on eol of dependencies. Fedora may feel it is better to have a version that it packages in line with what it packages in its own repos?

      I have some sympathy for that position. But it makes sense that it is annoying OBS when it is causing confusion if its a broken or poorly built repackags, and worse it sounds like things got very petty fast. I think OBS’s request that fedora flag this up as being different from the flathub version wasn’t unreasonable - but not sure what went down for it to get to thepoint of threatening legal action under misuse of the branding.

      Fedora probably should make it clearer to its users what the Fedora Flatpak repo is for.

    • originalucifer
      1•10 months ago

      Ubuntu was pushing snap,

      interesting… ive not seen anything regarding snaps in mint… flatpak is the other option in the software manager