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it's not exactly a case of 'lost their original vision'. Fedora is generally a fairly permissive project; we let maintainers do stuff. Since the mechanism to build Fedora flatpaks was needed (for the bundled flatpaks for Silverblue), it was normal - in Fedora terms - to say hey, let's just let maintainers use to it build flatpaks of any Fedora package, if they want to.

The obs-studio Fedora flatpak exists because the maintainer (yselkowitz) decided to make one. Ditto the few hundred others that exist - https://src.fedoraproject.org/group/flatpak-sig . Some of those are dupes of flathub, some aren't. Of the ones that are dupes, in some cases the flathub build is 'official', in other cases it isn't.

and yeah, yselkowitz created a lot of them, most of which are very simple - it's not really a lot of work to create a flatpak when there's an existing package, the definitions for most of them look like https://src.fedoraproject.org/flatpaks/bless/blob/stable/f/c... . Kinda the point of Fedora flatpaks is that you get a lot of the work done 'for free' in the package build.

I don't know why he decided to create all of those, maybe the idea was to try and create a critical mass of stuff so it would be kinda viable to get all your software from Fedora flatpak repos the way you can get all your software from Fedora RPM repos, if you want to.



> it's not exactly a case of 'lost their original vision'.

Considering that one person that says that he worked at the beginning of the project writes that the original idea wasn't to compete with flathub and given the current state of affairs I would argue that the project today doesn't have the original vision anymore.

As for creating a ton of projects, today with LLMs I'm pretty sure that I can write code that scrapes github repos for installation instructions and use it to create thousands of packages for everything that can run in Linux, doesn't mean that I should because there would be no quality control at all.

It is a noble idea to create packages to help create critical mass, but even with simple packages, seven hundred are more than anyone can use specially when we're talking about software that most likely have a GUI, and if you never really use most of the packages that you create you are bound to create these issues with QA.

All of that could be avoided (or minimized) if the fedora project created two flatpak repos, one for core software and one for contrib software, but that probably would be clear competition to flathub and probably be mostly ignored.




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