On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 8:45 AM Josh Boyer <jwboyer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hello Fedora Community! > > I am a long-time Fedora Community member, and may be familiar to many > through previous FESCo or devel list discussions and passionate > debates. However I write to you today with a different community hat > on, as a lead Architect for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The RHEL > organization has been following the modularity discussions within > Fedora, particularly around ELN, and often the question of what plans > we have for modularity in RHEL 9 has come up. Our Fedora Project Lead > and a number of FESCo members have reached out and asked if we can > provide some perspective here, and I am both happy and excited to have > that opportunity. > Thank you for taking the opportunity to talk to us from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux perspective. I greatly appreciate that and I hope others respond kindly to this outreach with constructive feedback. > As the Fedora Council has pointed out [1], we certainly acknowledge > there are improvements to be made and have a team already working on > them. They recently outlined their plans in conjunction with our > Product Management team in a Fedora Council call as well [2]. We’re > continuing to invest time and effort in this packaging solution and > are confident that the team can deliver against their plan. It is > somewhat of a new experience for all of us when Red Hat is direct with > our product intentions, but we discussed the larger gaps we see with > usage in RHEL and are putting our efforts towards solving those gaps > with this plan. > > Modularity is important to RHEL and those efforts are already > underway. We will be leveraging modularity in RHEL 9 where it most > makes sense. This is primarily centered around our Application > Streams concept, which has been well received by our customer base. > Providing a consistent but improved experience is the base > requirement, which allows us to have continuity from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 > and lowers the hurdle for our customers when upgrading from one major > version to another. > Personally, as a user of the Application Streams stuff in my custom-built EL containers, it's very nice, and it works well for providing the flexibility I've needed while having a fully supportable stack of software. It's a bit less fun on regular servers and VM environments, but I think this can improve. > It is always good to push the boundaries and search for better ideas > and improvements, and that is part of what makes Fedora great. We are > doing this in the context of the RHEL 9 release as well, so our near > term timeline and requirements mean we are working on evolving > modularity, not a revolution or a replacement. We are excited by ELN, > as it presents a possible space to allow those that want to continue > to iterate on modules a place to do so without necessarily impacting > the broader Fedora distribution in its entirety. It is my personal > hope that we can use that opportunity to improve modules and > modularity in the open source, Fedora-first way we’d prefer. Our near > term effort to improve the existing modularity implementation ahead of > RHEL 9 needs to occur, and we’d like to do that work in Fedora, rather > than in closed product development. Longer term, we are open to > contributing to a better replacement that meets many of the same > goals. This is what makes our distribution ecosystem work well, and > not having that upstream lessens the value we all get from such > experimentation in the open. > Something that has been bothering me a bit is that there's a lot of mixed messaging around ELN, even from Red Hatters. Don't get me wrong: I *absolutely* want ELN to exist, and I like that we're doing it. I *want* RHEL development happening in Fedora. But I'm confused about the purpose of ELN. Is it intended to be the development playground for Red Hatters? Or is it a community initiative to support Fedora and Red Hat to come together on developing RHEL? Or is it just a fake-RHEL built on Fedora to minimize the burden of forking Fedora for making RHEL later? I had personally hoped that ELN would be an opportunity to allow the Fedora community and Red Hat to work together on building the future RHEL more directly, but I am unsure of what it does or what it is for now. As for iterating on modularity in Fedora through ELN, I think this is a good idea. I want to see the implementation of modularity fleshed out and the packager experience improved, and I think the only way to do that is to actually use it and inflict all the pain on the people who need it by not permitting weird hacky workarounds to make module builds work. If something is broken, the standard code path has to be fixed, and that's how I expect this will work. I'm already aware that CentOS rebuilds of RHEL are not necessarily straightforward because many hacky shortcuts are taken to build RHEL content and CentOS does not have those in place. However, I am concerned that as ELN develops further, we are likely to be even more starved for build resources than we have been previously. Modules are huge build chains that essentially fill up the builders. Outside of the improved AArch64 hardware, I'm personally unaware of any improvements in our build capacity to help support the higher demands for the build system. To note, we'd have this problem without modules if we had Koschei configured to auto-rebuild and submit rebuilds on dependency drift so that packagers didn't have to do that grunt work manually, so it's a matter of we literally do not have enough resources to support more automation. I've mentioned this before in other threads, but to reiterate: it is my belief that Fedora does not have enough build capacity to support building a modularized distribution. Even when we were doing modularized builds in the Fedora Rust SIG, it was common for module build jobs to stall out waiting for resources, and thus get stuck midway through. This also starved regular builds of resources to get things done. > Hopefully that provides some context and helps FESCo and the wider > community understand where Red Hat is headed with modularity on the > Enterprise side. > It absolutely does, and I hope you continue to engage with us on this! Let's make everything better together! -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
