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The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

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Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#141
post #3

who should do packaging for each distro? - upstream maintainer: too much work. each distro requires certain best practices/convention. - distro: may not meet certain standard set by upstream maintainer.

The whole point of flatpak is so that the upstream maintainer can release one well tested binary and it works on all distros...

As a long time Linux user and someone who tried to get in some software into Few Linux Distro Repositories, it's high time we start recommending the above model.

Not my words, but at this point I'll even take just a zip file with apps that always just works over having to deal with all the headaches from distro package managers for user level software.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#142
post #27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#143
post #84
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's little real difference between OBS packaged as flatpak and OBS packaged as distro RPMs. This is basically the same conflict between upstreams and distro developers that has been raging since time immemorial.

I think there's two big things involved: firstly, that distros just bump library versions of frameworks like Qt and regressions in the frameworks introduce regressions in the app, which is exactly the kind of conflict that causes annoyed users and upstream devs (and it'll especially annoy the devs if they're called 'irresponsible' for not keeping on top of the release treadmill for vague security concerns). Secondly,…

[deleted]

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#144
post #128

This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…

> Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect That's rich, coming from a project very closely tied to Gtk, which has a history of massive breaking changes, and outright removing functionality, leading to many projects continuing to use older versions of gtk for a very long time.

One of those project is the OG — GIMP.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#145
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't trying to suggest I thought OBS was in the wrong here, to be clear, just that the debate between maintainers and developers, and not wanting to get bugs for things that were external, reminded me of that exchange. There's plenty of other examples, of course - one that springs to mind was when Ubuntu shipped a patch of their own design in OpenZFS that caused data loss, and it got reported to upstream.

To be fair, not necessarily singling out your comment: I've seen mixed sentiment around the net. I think the characterization of the threats as being "legal threats" makes people more prone to see this as the OBS project being vexatious, but it seems like it's more a last resort to get Fedora to even pay attention. And credit to Fedora, it looks like they're working quickly to fix the problem now. It's pretty obvious…

If you read the actual bug thread with the back and forth, they weren't to the point the fedora contact was pretty hostile about their use of a slightly old QT version and was adamant about keeping it in place. The fixes only happened within hours after the trademark/copyright request presumably because that went to legal and legal WTF'd at the whole situation and their maintainer's handling of the situation and magically it got fixed almost immediately thereafter.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#147
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't link to this guy's site. He has a serious personal problem with every reader of HN (including the vast majority he's never met and knows nothing about) and serves an NSFW image to anybody that has this site in the referrer request header.

[flagged]

> Don't tell me what to do.

Breathe.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#149
post #96
post #3

who should do packaging for each distro? - upstream maintainer: too much work. each distro requires certain best practices/convention. - distro: may not meet certain standard set by upstream maintainer.

If distro maintainers are going to futz with packages, for good reasons or bad, then they need to bear the corresponding support burden themselves and ensure it does not fall on the upstream maintainers. This is not really any different from the Debian OpenSSL fiasco, or the Debian cdrecord fiasco, or the Debian xscreensaver fiasco, or...

> or the Debian cdrecord fiasco

I'm not sure I'd call that a fiasco, and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#License_compatibility...

says it was hardly a Debian thing. More to the point, I'd argue that there is a meaningful difference between "we're going to patch this" and "we aren't confident that we can ship this at all".

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#150
post #128

This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…

> Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect That's rich, coming from a project very closely tied to Gtk, which has a history of massive breaking changes, and outright removing functionality, leading to many projects continuing to use older versions of gtk for a very long time.

Many different people have different priorities in fedora.

I believe they mainly remove functionality between major releases of GTK, not within a release. Can you cite an example where they have done this between gtk minor releases ? Aka gtk 3.1 -> 3.2 ?

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