The unofficial OBS Studio Flatpak on Fedora Flatpaks is, seemingly, poorly packaged and broken, leading to users complaining upstream thinking they are being served the official package. There are several examples of this being the case outside of OBS Studio as well, and many users who are unhappy with Fedora Flatpaks being pushed with no or unclear options to opt-out.
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/2754
- https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463
We would like to request that this package is either removed, or made clear that it is a third party package. It should not be upstream’s responsibility to ensure downstream packages are working, especially when they overwrite official packages.
I would also like some sort of explanation on why someone thought it was a good idea to take a Flatpak that was working perfectly fine, break it, and publish it at a higher priority to our official builds. We spend an enormous amount of effort on our official Flatpak published to Flathub to ensure everything is working as well as it can be.
Thanks in advance.
16 Comments
boredatoms
Linux distributions have often whitelabeled software that make trademark threats
tuananh
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.
kattagarian
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?
ajross
Meh. Seems like there's some unstated background context here. The proximate cause isn't the linked bug at OBS, it's this bug report to Fedora: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463
Basically it demands that the FlatPak be removed from the repository citing "problems" that aren't detailed. Then 22 days later they start throwing bombs on their own gitlab (again, without details about what the problems with the FlatPak) and get those posted to HN?
Lots of steam, no meat. If this did go to a lawyer, the first question would be "Well, did you try to work with them?" Seemingly the answer is no. Or if it's "yes", it's somewhere back in the history of a pre-existing conflict.
This isn't the first conflict between an upstream and a distro about packaging process and it won't be the last. By definition the feature we users want from the distros is that they are making opinionated choices about how to present the world of software to us.
stolen_biscuit
Does anyone have more context for the name-calling and poor communication from the Fedora team? Seems like pretty poor behaviour from them if true
akerl_
Given that OBS is GPL licensed, any legal action would have to be trademark-based, right?
It feels like they'd have a hard time making that case, since package repositories are pretty clearly not representing themselves as the owners of, or sponsored by, the software they package.
wilg
Lots of Linux-related drama on HN lately. Maybe someone should offer free conflict resolution classes for libre software maintainers.
guelo
Centralized App stores are bad enough, but App Stores tied to each OS release and the random whims of distro maintainers is insane. It holds back the whole ecosystem.
johnea
Moral of the story: Don't use flatpack…
diego_sandoval
Last time I checked, Flathub was rife with unofficial packages posing as official ones (using the URL of upstream, with no verification, when the upstream dev has no association to the package).
That's the main reason I never took Flatpak seriously.
rincebrain
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 xscreensaver that had been fixed for a long time in upstream but e.g. Debian doesn't just ship upstream updates every 30 minutes. He requested Debian stop shipping it (or update it? I didn't go reread the entire chain before replying), Debian declined.
He then put in a piece of code that popped up a notification if the system time was sufficiently far past the hardcoded value, informing people they should upgrade, and Debian debated patching his message out.
[1] – jwz dot org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop-shipping-xscreensaver/
(Link turned into not a link because I had forgotten how jwz feels about HN referrers.)
mappu
There is some additional commentary/background in the OSNews reporting: https://www.osnews.com/story/141723/fedora-should-not-push-i…
halifaxbeard
more surprising is there's no way for them to delete it from the flatpak registry
https://pagure.io/releng/issue/12586#comment-955583
gbraad
The package was already updated before this post was made:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/flatpaks/obs-studio/history/co…
which reads:
“`
end-of-life: The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build.
“`
attentionmech
why don't they just block the obs project and let users install it in unofficial manner while removing themselves as middleman? I mean, they have certain let's say guidelines but why go about enforcing them in this weird manner.
uneekname
I am a happy Fedora user, but the "Software" application it ships with has always been a joke. Pushing flatpaks (and especially poorly-maintained ones like this) has made it worse.
When I open Software I always think it's going to be a clean GTK interface for dnf. But it appears to just do its own thing, and I've learned not to trust the app listings in there.