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OpenSUSE package maintainer removes Bottles’ donation button with "dont-support.patch" file
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
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.
That's a lot if communication for someone that's working for free.
That's a disclaimer in the bug submission page.
Which everyone will ignore.
They take donations, that's not free.
As a guy who worked in OS security, no fucking way will I be doing that.
So, basically, you make software that doesn't work outside flatpak without patches, then start removed about how much those patches suck, then, instead of pretty much saying "we only support flapaks, stop bothering us with distro-related issues" on the issue page, you add even more stuff that needs to be patched out because "sesurity"? Makes perfect sense, ngl.
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.
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.
Yes, and another big difference is that Bottles refuses to provide any kind of help to package maintainers.
According to maintainers' comments on the Github project, they have to figure out how to build it by trial and error.
I was actually really surprised that there's isn't any kind of build documentation.
It's pretty unusual.
actively hostile is putting it nicely, imagine being a paid supporter of bottles, you wake up, update, and find out the app you used to effectively use most of your important apps has no intentionally bricked itself and you need to either download install and setup flatpak, which breaks a good chunk of your apps by default do to the sandboxing, and now you need to spend hours trying to figure that out, or roll back.
I 100% support suse's decisions.
I've been around the block enough times to notice greed and entitlement when I see it.
The bottles devs don't have their heads in the right place. They should be focusing more on making their software better instead of worrying about who is redistributing it.