@FrankyU2 What got my blood boiling earlier has nothing to do with my need or use of Packman, your need or use of Packman, or anyone else’s decision to use Packman.
What ticked me was a couple things (1) that people feel entitled to criticize or be argumentative to openSUSE and the administration and other users of this forum due to something completely outside openSUSE’s control and (2) that the accusation was that this forum has a “reputation” of being unfriendly.
You said not to shoot the messenger, and I won’t at all because I know this is not something you’re making up (I have heard it elsewhere), but you did sort of mention this unprovoked. I did read through the whole thread before jumping in so I knew the context.
Similarly, I am not a lawyer and do not claim to know the legalities of all this, but my understanding is similar to that of @OrsoBruno .
Also I completely understand where @deano_ferrari is coming from, and it is something I try to do before posting for support, and approach with humility and kindness.
Can’t help it if the word of mouth is not to your liking. I didn’t mention it out of the blue but because I think it might have some bearing on the overall animosity that seems to have developed.
Also I’m not quite sure where you got the idea that has you fuming that somehow people are demanding openSuse ignore proprietary software patents. I’ve never suggested that and I don’t know who has or what exactly had you riled up?
I think there’s another factor with this sort of “word of mouth”. Social media and some online platforms tend to amplify negative experiences. The many people who receive helpful advice, solve their problem and move on generally don’t post about it.
That doesn’t mean those experiences aren’t genuine, but they aren’t necessarily representative of the majority. The admins and mods here (including myself) work hard to keep this place welcoming and friendly.
What got me was the word of mouth thing (i.e., the reputation thing) but the Packman stuff was more about what other people have responded. It was just your message that was discussing it with the reputation topic. Reading back, I definitely didn’t make that clear and it was a bit of a case of “shooting the puck before aiming at the net”, so for that, I apologize (@FrankyU2 ).
That being said, I am good to shake hands and move on.
On the contrary. Since I started using openSUSE as my daily drive since 2016 the forum has been very helpful and patience at many different occasions. This is my experience, might differ from others though.
I do think it’s helpful to have this discussion thread about the various problems caused by the demise of Packman. It shows how profound this change is. For so many years, Packman quietly solved a problem. A big gap will be left.
As for the helpfulness of the community, the distro forums have been a tremendous source of help for me on my journey from SuSE to Mandriva, Mageia, Manjaro and now back to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Different people have different interpersonal skills, and sometimes experienced command line users can overestimate the knowledge of people who seek help (“Why didn’t you post the output of…”). But the community plays a crucial role in building that knowledge. I think it’s useful to think of the forums as a learning experience.
So to summarize, the OP was hoping to find guidance as to how to replace the pacman repository without having to use flatpacks, and our answer, as a community was… get over it?
Personally, I’ve been relying on pacman for the past 20+ years and was hoping for something a little more helpful in this thread.
Honestly doing a repo like packman is not the hardest task in the world, you just need to rebuild the packages with one different setting and then rebuild each package that uses it.
Obviously getting over not having h264/h265 thumbnails in Dolphin (or whatever) and using flatpak is easier.
Mostly it boils down to refusing to use flatpak. Reminding again this is not supported officially due to licensing and packman is 3rd party, so these things are expected.
Everytime someone mentions a usecase that actually isn’t different by using a flatpak you just gotta ask yourself…
I think the problem is the maintainers of pacman were too good at this stuff. That’s what created the “ingrained need to switch” that you mention. Nobody had to think about it too hard because… just add the pacman repo.
It was standard advice handed out for a long time as far as first steps to take after installing opensuse.
No, you need to thank the openSUSE Maintainers by allowing the requisite conditions and defines (think patent encumbered switches) in the relevant spec files, this allowed linking to the default openSUSE packages and rebuilding with the switches on via Project Configuration. It ultimately evolved into just a rebuild service…
Likewise, I have always asked users to test first, please note I’m a Packman Build Service Project admin…
I have some questions.
How many codecs are we discussing?
Are there binaries available?
Where is the source code for them and where will it be when Packman goes away?
It wouldn’t be hard to make a simple GUI with check boxes to install them or even build then install them. This is the solution new users and recent Windows converts need, otherwise they’ll skip Tumbleweed because word will get around about how hard it is to get this or that codec working.
Available binaries would be the best, but a GUI could fetch the source and compile it, all without touching a terminal. It beats losing users because of a missing codec and could lead new users to explore how programs are built.
I assume there isn’t an easy answer or this thread wouldn’t be 90+ posts long.
If you don’t want to use the Videolan repo or Flatpaks then ultimately you have to grab rmp source files and build everything yourself, perhaps make a bash script that automates the process. Or keep using packman till the end of the year and hope someone adopts the project and keeps it up
When you have a technical help question about the Packman repository and it’s possible replacement, then ask so in a technical help section of these forums (Install/Boot/Login seems appropriate to me).
But first browse through the forums if one of the many technical help topics about this subject does not satisfy your need.
After all this is “only” Open Chat, thus discussions can run wide off-topic at times and and people will express their ideas about the subject and probably not technical help.
You would need the appropriate build environment and dependencies, and then you have to maintain those locally built packages as Tumbleweed rolls on. Build times and memory and disk space requirements would also be significant, depending on the packages involved. Not all user systems would be up to the task.
It is technically feasible, but turning it into a tool that handles all this transparently and reliably would be a big undertaking, not to mention the technical support topics that would inevitably follow.
