[CentOS-devel] Packages dropping out of modules

On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 10:02 PM Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at 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.

-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!