On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 10:02 PM Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel@gmail.com wrote:
In the longer term, can we discard modules? Or encourage RHEL upstream to phase them out? I've not seen any reports of people actually using them successfully, only reports of their breaking dependency chains and causing obscure version conflicts when using the "--best" option for mock or dnf package selection.
It is unlikely that anyone here can convince Red Hat to drop them, for some very important reasons:
1. They work *incredibly* well for container use-cases, and that's Red Hat's bread and butter now 2. They minimize the cognitive overhead for consumption use-cases, which outstrip production use-cases (package builds) by a lot 3. Most of the issues with AppStreams/modules are due to incoherency in the specification and disagreements among implementers (fixable with a lot of work!) 4. We're stuck with it for at least a decade because of RHEL 8
Personally, I've spent a little over a year working on implementing modularity support in my package build tooling. I'm nearly done now, and I'm pretty pleased with myself. That said, I have a long list of complaints and suggestions for improvements. We'll see how things improve over the next year or so. But, the folks I work with who are focused on containers really love AppStreams because it gives them the flexibility they want while giving them a fully-supported path to fresh software.
I'm choosing to take the opportunity to see if I can help make the next generation of this stuff better. We'll see how that goes, but I'm optimistic. It's a hard problem, we're ~40% of the way there, and if solved right, would be a huge boon for the community.