Re: Fedora Workstation WG minutes, 2025-05-06

Hi, last week I experimented with using Gemini to take meeting notes 
(in addition to the normal human-generated meeting minutes). Here they 
are, with a few minor corrections ("FlatHub" -> "Flathub", and 
"composers" or "Compositors" -> "compose" or "composes"). I think this 
gives a better review of the meeting than our usual notetaking, 
although some of the wording in the summary is a bit awkward.

We started taking notes with Gemini halfway through this meeting, after 
the "Ship preinstalled apps as Flatpaks" discussion.

May 6, 2025

Meeting May 6, 2025 at 08:57 CDT

Meeting records Transcript

Summary

Timothée Ravier proposed a shift to selectively include Fedora 
flatpaks on atomic desktops, prioritizing a smaller, well-maintained 
set, which Yaakov Selkowitz strongly opposed, advocating for 
prioritizing all Fedora content over Flathub. Participants including 
Michael Catanzaro, Sebastian Wick, and Timothée Ravier discussed user 
preferences, Flathub's role, resource allocation, collaboration, and 
the challenges of filtering Flathub content. Matthias Clasen reported 
on a GTK update for handling uninstalled help documentation, and Neal 
Gompa (Conan Kudo) discussed the likely approval of the Wayland-only 
GNOME change proposal and an XWayland bug fix, also announcing a new 
open-source compose tool.

Details

Proposal to Filter Fedora Flatpaks

Timothée Ravier introduced a change proposal to shift from including 
all Fedora flatpaks by default on atomic desktops to a more selective 
approach. The rationale behind this proposal is to address current 
issues with Fedora flatpaks and align with community feedback to 
prioritize a smaller set of well-maintained packages. The intention is 
to begin with a limited, reliable set and expand as needed for 
applications better suited as Fedora flatpaks.

Opposition to Prioritizing Flathub

Yaakov Selkowitz strongly opposed the proposal, arguing that Fedora 
should prioritize its own content. They stated that on atomic desktops, 
flatpaks are the primary way to add applications, and this proposal 
would place Flathub before Fedora, which they believe is incorrect and 
against Fedora's principles. Yaakov Selkowitz emphasized that if there 
are problems with Fedora flatpaks, the solution is to fix them, not to 
favor third-party content like Flathub, which doesn't necessarily meet 
Fedora's standards.

User Preference and Fedora's Role

Michael Catanzaro acknowledged Yaakov Selkowitz's desire to prioritize 
Fedora content but suggested that a large number of users prefer 
Flathub content. They raised concerns about the supply chain security 
of some Flathub applications, noting that they are not always built 
from source, which poses a significant problem. Despite this, Michael 
Catanzaro viewed Timothée Ravier's proposal as a reasonable 
compromise, though they cautioned against implementing it before 
addressing the build-from-source issue with Flathub.

Resources and Collaboration with Flathub

Sebastian Wick argued for implementing the change sooner rather than 
later, suggesting that preferring Flathub might encourage more 
resources to be directed towards its improvement. They emphasized the 
need for collaboration between Fedora and Flathub, viewing a "them 
versus us" mentality as unhelpful in achieving the shared goal of 
better application distribution. Sebastian Wick proposed creating a 
filter for Flathub applications based on Fedora's requirements.

Concerns about Filtering Flathub Content

Timothée Ravier raised practical challenges in filtering Flathub, 
particularly in distinguishing between correctly packaged open-source 
applications, those with some pre-built binaries, and proprietary ones. 
Michael Catanzaro echoed these concerns, emphasizing the need to be 
stricter about accepting applications with pre-built binaries of 
unknown provenance.

Next Steps for the Change Proposal

Timothée Ravier indicated that the change proposal had not yet been 
formally announced or submitted to FESCO. They planned to have further 
discussions, including at the KDE contributor conference (KDC) and 
their talk at Flock, and encouraged those in support to add their names 
to the proposal. The target for implementation is Fedora 43, with the 
announcement likely occurring by the end of June or early July.

GTK Help API Update

Matthias Clasen reported on progress regarding handling uninstalled 
help documentation (Yelp) in application UIs. A GTK merge request has 
been implemented to add a new API that uses the portal to query whether 
help is supported. This allows applications to disable help-related UI 
elements if Yelp is not installed, although applications need to adopt 
the new API.

Wayland-Only GNOME Change Proposal

Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) provided an update on the Wayland-only GNOME 
change proposal submitted to FESCO. While there was one dissenting vote 
based on aligning with upstream, Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) expects the 
proposal to pass, especially given the strong upstream momentum towards 
removing the X11 session in GNOME 49. They argued that Fedora should 
not ship a desktop session with bugs that upstream developers are 
unwilling or unable to fix.

GNOME Session X11 Support Issue

Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) also mentioned a bug report regarding broken 
XWayland support in GNOME Session 48. This issue has been fixed 
upstream and likely needs to be backported to the 48 branch.

New Open-Source Compose Tool

Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) announced the public release of their new 
open-source tool for creating composes from Fedora and CentOS content. 
The tool has been submitted as a BOD update and is documented in a blog 
post.

Suggested next steps

Matthias Clasen will investigate the possibility of Fedora having a 
seat on a potential Flathub advisory board, leveraging Allan Day's 
GNOME-side knowledge and exploring opportunities from the new GNOME ED.

The group will create a list of acceptance criteria for Flathub 
applications and evaluate if current Flatpak filtering capabilities 
support filtering based on those criteria.

Timothée Ravier will announce their change proposal by the end of June 
and implement it by the end of July.

Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) will backport the fix for the broken X11 
support in GNOME session 48.


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