![](https://seccdn.libravatar.org/avatar/ed5b1491aa79201a8eaf93bf57193584.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 2/17/23 12:39, Lukáš Krejza wrote:
Thank you Gerard and Robert for appearing and explaining some confusion.
If I may have some additional questions and remarks:
Dne pátek 17. února 2023 16:48:07 CET, Robert Schweikert napsal(a):
Hi,
On 2/17/23 10:07, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
[ Moving board@ to Bcc: ]
On Fri 2023-02-17, Lukáš Krejza wrote:
2) Did Board itself decided this? If yes, is there a Board meeting record available publicly, where proposal and / or final decision was done? I am mainly interested about which board member proposed it and how were the votes.
The openSUSE Board has not been involved in this topic, and it generally is outside of the scope of the board as usually agreed upon.
How is it possible, that community discussion happens _after_ announcement of Leap -> ALP and not _before_?
Leap is currently based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. Since ALP (or "ALP", I'm not sure the name is final) is going to succeed SUSE Linux Enterprise 15,
This is where the confusion starts, ALP will not replace SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Something built from ALP will replace SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. ALP is a PLATFORM from which we build other things. ALP itself does not dictate a read-only filesystem with transactional-updates and btrfs. One of the things that we will build form ALP will be *-Micro, in that incarnation there will be a read-only root filesystem based on btrfs that uses snapshots. But *-Micro will not be the only thing that gets built from AL-PLATFORM.
Ultimately this is like talking about Concrete and people basically decreeing that when you have Concrete you can only make one thing from it, a foundation. That of course is completely incorrect. Concrete is a material, people us it to build houses, walls, roads, secure fence posts, make sculptures, ......
This is exactly my point. "Everyone" just assumes, that:
1) ALP-based distro means heavy focus on containers + transaction updates for root FS, exclusively 2) SLE going for ALP means Leap will go ALP without doubt and there is no other option
Both are then wrong?
These 2 points IMHO make public and more importantly Leap users (which i see im my eyes - please take no offense - as our little kids we need to take care for, even when it's sometimes exhausting) into believing (and fearing), that they are forced into a change by an enterprise. Change that they didn't called for, for whatever reasons. They think that they will have to use flatpaks, that have bundled libraries they laugh at Other OS (c) since they have linux. They think they will lose beloved zypper and yast2 sw_single ;) Typical Leap user IMHO does not want change.
Well most people are not excited about change if it is something that people have been used to for some time. That is not unique to Leap users
And changing the way they install software, with "cool" addition of the containerized desktop app problems we do not talk about, is the worst change possible for them.
I think that number of articles getting this wrong is spreading like a plague, so it already suffices something like openSUSE news post, what ALP-based means and what it doesn't mean in comparison to current Leap.
If we knew the answer it would have been shared. The problem is that there are very few concrete answers as to what this will look like. I get that people do not like uncertainty and the announcement "Leap after 15.5 will be very different" was probably a bit premature given that we are not certain what this looks like. Simon, and I encourage everyone to read the factory thread [1], and others have started some concrete work on what this might look like. And again, this is a community project and with enough hands anything can be built.
I don't think the new "containers are the future" paradigma, but actual architecture change of the system. Is read-only root an option? Is using containers an option? Etc... That would clarify much confusion.
This confusion is also an actual reason why this thread exists.
We can talk about how useful is heavy containerization for desktops, but this is completely out of scope of this discussion IMHO.
What is IMHO important are these questions:
1) Does ALP-based distribution mean and requires/expect heavy containerization?
It is not a requirement, see the Hackweek work.
2) Is it expected to be fewer RPMs available in favour of flatpaks/whatever in an ALP-based distribution?
There is a good chance that fewer packages will be imported from the SUSE build service. If you look at Leap as a combination of packages from the SUSE internal build service + community packages from OBS and there is a certain balance then it can be expected that the count of OBS provided packages will be larger than it is today.
3) Current very simplified code packaging (for packages also available in SLE) path for Leap is (correct me if wrong, please): Upstream -> Packager -> Factory /Tumbleweed -> SLE -> Leap
There are more packages in Leap. See above.
How would the packaging path (according to current proposals) in ALP-based Leap look? I guess here is the main advantage of ALP-based?
We do not know. There is a chance that for the enterprise products certain "packages" will only be available as containers. That does not mean that this has to be the same for an openSUSE distribution. Again, while we have gotten used to a somewhat 1 to 1 relationship, between an Enterprise product and an openSUSE distribution there is no such requirement enforced by any technical limitation. Part of this was a question of maintainers. Back to waht I sated earlier, openSUSE is a community project everyone can pretty much built what they see fit.
4) Does majority of Leap users prefer ALP-based or non-ALP-based distro :) ?
5) Does majority of Leap community packagers prefer ALP-based or non-ALP-bysed distro?
6) What is the Board opinion? Is 100% of the Board ALP-positive? If no, what do opponents say? If yes, convince us too, please! What will a browsing PC gain and lose? What problem it will solve for them? What will sysadmin laptop gain and lose? What problem it will solve for them? What will gaming/multimedia PC gain and lose? What problem it will solve for them? What will enterprise work desktop gain and lose? What problem it will solve for them? What wil a server gain and lose? What problem it will solve for them?
Also, many users and packagers seem to forget, that Leap gap can be opened again. It's not written into stone. I guess flatpaks from OBS still use .spec files and have to build, so it should really be only matter of OBS configuration. I was in favor of that effort, but I am not so sure anymore.
For me, personally, I don't care (as an user). I use TW and until we have Factory and TW, I'm fine. But i care for the Leap users. How can we ask Leap users for an opinion most effectively? We can still revive and extend [1] (or something alike), but a post and a poll would be better :D
Later, Robert [1] https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/Y... -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Distinguished Engineer LINUX Technical Team Lead Public Cloud rjschwei@suse.com IRC: robjo