[cyphar]

I get the feeling you've never had to provide support for a distribution before. There are many guarantees that Red Hat or SUSE provide that are not provided by upstream projects. Freezing the release is the only sane way of doing it, and backporting fixes is necessary. There are exceptions to this, such as stable kernels (which was started by GregKH out of frustration of the backporting problem while at SUSE).

Upstreams don't have the resources to do proper release engineering, they're busy working on new features. The fact that SUSE and Red Hat spawned from a requirement for release engineering that upstreams were not able to provide should show that it takes a lot more work than you might think.

Also, can we please all agree as a community that writing patches and forking of codebases is literally the whole point of free software? If nobody should ever fork a codebase then why do we even have freedom #1 and #2? The trend of free software projects to have an anti-backport stance is getting ridiculous. If you don't want us to backport stuff, stop forcing us to do your release engineering for you.

[digi_owl]

Sadly more and more upstream wants to have their cake and eat it to. Just look at Flatpak, that is all about moving the updating and distribution from distros to upstream.

[cyphar]

I think Flatpak won't end up solving the problem though. Mainly because it still requires distributions to exist and provide system updates, but also because it just makes the static binary problem (that distributions were made to fix) even worse.

Honestly what I think we need is to have containers that actually overlay on the host system and only include whatever specialised stuff they need on top of the host. So updates to the host do propagate into containers -- and for bonus points the container metadata can still be understood by the host.

[digi_owl]

In the end i don't see it as a technical problem, but a mentality problem.

Again and again we see that without any financial incentive, developers are loath to put any effort into backwards compatibility and interface stability.

At the same time they all want people to be running their latest and shiniest.

So in the end, what will happen is that each "app" will bundle the world, or at least as much as they feel they need to.