[zyga]

With my upstream developer hat and Ubuntu developer for about a decade hat on I really call BS on this. This is very hard in practice. It's hard even when you know things very well just because it is very complex and involves multiple pieces moving across multiple organisations and people.

Snaps, flatpak and appimage really make the aspect of distribution of free software less crazy. It is a hard problem to solve, we will get some things right and some things wrong. We will learn in the process. Eventually the platform may become useful for proprietary software but it will first and foremost improve for FOSS.

If you are on a niche distribution you are missing out 10s of thousands of applications because it is packaged for Debian or Fedora and not for your system. If you are on Debian stable you miss out that important update or that new feature that you won't have for the next months or more. If you are on the packaging side you know how it is like in the trenches.

I really cannot believe anyone who has done packaging or upstream development to not acknowledge those real world issues. Packaging is extremely hard because we all made it so.

This is a step towards making it less hard.