Hacker News Reader

Comment by kattagarian | Hacker News Reader

Why would fedora have their own version of OBS studio when the package is already supported by the official team on flathub? Isn't this exactly the reason why flatpak was created, to avoid all the needless packaging that every distro had to do in order to install the program?

View on HN

I wasted my time browsing through the drama.

The idea behind it is really for corporate uses of Fedora/GNOME. Sysadmins, through Fedora Flatpack, can re-package certain software from Flathub in accordance with their draconian corporate policies.

As a person that has had to endure stupid corporate policies and since Fedora is _mostly_ used in corporate workstation. I can understand this.

What I don't understand why it's the _default_ to prefer Fedora Flatpack software over Flathub. For people that are just getting into linux, I can see why that's painful and the UX to be terrible.

"I installed Z software. It installed some junk re-package. I only realized it installed junk re-package after a week of investigation. Installing it from different source and now it works. Thanks, Fedora! I wasted a week of my time!"

From what I've read the Fedora project has an interest in providing solely open source and non patent encumbered software like codecs. Which sounds like something OBS may infringe on

Sounds like if the want to provide their own forked and less functional versions of software, they should rebrand the software like distros used to do with Firefox. Rather than cripple it and leave people blaming OBS.

I heard it was a Fedora-wide effort to make its own flatpaks, but I don't really know why.

Well, for one, Flatpak is a stupid design where the downloaded software gets to tell the system what if any sandboxing is applied. The way to have it be a security boundary is by enforcing the packaging :-(

You as a user can decide to install (or not) flatpaks based on their sandboxing settings, or even edit them with a tool like Flatseal. Which is a huge advancement compared to just allowing any binary to do any change in your system (with enough permissions of course).

Also, distributions can also provide their flatpak repos (or even another third party) and vet the packages with their own set of rules (such as "no packages with full filesystem access").

they infringe on that only on braindead legislatures that recognize software patents though

My understanding is that OBS is licensed in a free compatible license, so why someone in specific wants to keep maintaining any and all versions seems moot.

Flatpak provides an alternative to the distro package but the distro package is still useful. The distro package provides tighter integration with the OS and provides stability guarantees that Flatpak does not. The distro version also allows an OS deployment with a single tool. They’re both useful.

The distro package in question here is a Fedora-specific Flatpak, not the Fedora-specific RPM distro package version. From my understanding, it is missing things like patented codecs which then causes bug reports to be filed with upstream, OBS, instead of the ones responsible for the package, Fedora.

Fedora has its own Flatpak repo as the default instead of Flathub (which has the official OBS package from the upstream developers).

The concern isn't about Fedora packaging and distributing an RPM, but they they also package their own flatpack that overrides the official OBS one.

Ah! The conflict makes more sense then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com