[thomasfortes]

One of the comments in the main thread says that the original vision for the fedora flatpaks was to be mainly for things that fedora wanted to have tight control and be preinstalled in their distros (Firefox, LibreOffice, GNOME and apps, etc...), which makes a lot of sense, but at some point it lost their original vision and started packaging everything under the sun.

In another comment someone says that most of the extra packages are maintained by a single person (more than 700), there's no way a single person can validate and test all these packages (or even use them).

[gbraad]

Not sure where you saw this, as that was also my argument why Flatpak gave "application developers are in control of the release cycle" again instead of this being the packager; they can't perform the same quality control.

They should never package what rpmfusion offers, or distribute a new flatpak when something is already available. That worked when flathub didn't exist or was mostly empty, but that time is gone now.

Note: I want to understand what led to the comment of the C&D-like legal threat.

[thomasfortes]

Hey, here they are :)

Original vision https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95406...

Person with more than 700 packages https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541...

As for the C&D, the github has some issues with Fedora distros and labeled as "Dependency issues" and there's no indication if the user is using the fedora flatpak or the flathub one, so if I had to guess I would guess that they aren't that happy with:

    1. Being asked to fix bugs introduced by downstream.

    2. Having their brand damaged because it isn't clear that the fedora 
       flatpak is a way more limited version than the verified one.

    3. Having their issues with their complaints minimized and ignored by
       the people responsible for the fedora flatpak system.

[adamwill]

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.

[adamwill]

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.

[thomasfortes]

> 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.