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OpenSUSE package maintainer removes Bottles’ donation button with "dont-support.patch" file (social.treehouse.systems)

submitted 3 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 hours ago

I read the drama in Twitter and PR.

While Bottles maintainer does not do a great job to politely prove the point of the patch to disable Bottles outside of sandboxed environments, he is not required to be a diplomat as mainter (though it would be better, of course) and Bottles decision makes total sense - they asked to not package their software long ago as they drown in bugs and supporting non predictable environment with unknown dependencies creates too many problems for them. I can understand that, development is hard as it is, unpredictability of environment multiplies this complexity.

They are maintainers and they do what they can to support the project, so removing donate button while packaging software done by others (who asked not to do it) is a childish move. Yes it's FOSS, but morally it sounds a bit wrong.

We ask too much of mainters when it comes to soft skills, not all of us got these, but also not all of us are FOSS maintainers. And I think we should stop asking everyone to possess all skills in the world and react on someone's rudeness as we are 5 (not saying we shouldn't improve).

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

It's kinda shitty, but after reading the other links in the post I can't say it's very surprising.

Bottles devs seem weirdly hostile to the idea of anyone repackaging their software, because apparently they're the only ones that are able to do it properly.

edit: devs also refuse bug reports from any version that's not Flatpak, so in this context removing the button doesn't seem that unreasonable.

edit2: now that I've had a closer look at the PR mentioned in the post I'm not surprised at all.
Bottles devs are actively hostile. Apparently with this PR it's impossible to run Bottles outside Flatpak without the package maintainers patching the code.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

There is an entire post from the devs on why Bottles is packaged the way it is. [https://usebottles.com/posts/2022-06-07-an-open-letter/]. If you put yourself in the developers' position, it's actually understandable. Distributions ship Bottles package filled with issues or straight up borked, users turn their frustrations to the Bottles developers instead of package maintainers, devs get frustrated and bombarded with issues that they can't fixed. A ton of time, effort and mental health is wasted. I think the wishes of devs should be respected, even though the software is open source and you CAN package it however you'd like.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Actively resisting packaging is not the way, tho. You can just require an issue to be reproducible with flatpak, and otherwise tell ppl to bother the maintainer.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

That's a lot it communication for someone that's working for free.

[–] 0x0 6 points 59 minutes ago

That's a disclaimer in the bug submission page.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I don't think it's understandable in this case, no.

The entire project depends on Wine, imagine if Wine devs restricted Bottles in what way they are allowed to use it just because Wine project doesn't want to deal with bugs potentially introduced by the Bottles dev.

But they won't, because of the license.
And neither can the Bottles devs.

If they want to have total control over their source code, fine, but then they cannot claim to be open-source and release it under GPL.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 minutes ago

just because Wine project doesn’t want to deal with bugs potentially introduced by the Bottles dev.

If you have issue with Bottles, you don't immediately go to the Wine bug tracker. If you have issue with packaged Bottles, you immediately go to the Bottles bug tracker. There is clearly a big difference.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The creator and maintainer of openSUSE Aeon leans towards support of the decision, as he says "package maintaners can do whatever they want".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Thanks for the additional context!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

that's embarrassing one thing is to patch it to make it work on your system but to remove the donation buttons entirely...