Why should people care about RPM packaging

[FrostyX]

Creating this ticket based on our team retrospective discussion.

[FrostyX]

There used to be a slide like this in the RPM packaging workshop:

Packaging as a standard (aka, why package at all?)

• Auditing software usage
  • What, where?
• Version control
• Reproducible installations (Kickstart integration via anaconda, Ansible)
• Minimizes risk
• Security
  • Rogue Applications
  • Licensing
  • Trusted provider

So you see why sudo make install is just not enough...

which is still valid but it is IMHO an outdated argument from early 2000s when it was common to sudo make install. Funilly enough, it is starting to be an important topic with the current rise of curl | bash installation instructions everywhere.

The point I was trying to make during the meeting is that this is not enough. In the past explaining why to use packages implied why to use RPM packages, because the audience was presumably Fedora users and there was no alternative to RPM packages. These days we have options ...

Why to use RPM packages and not ...

• Universal application formats like Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages
• Language specific package managers like pip, cargo
• Package managers that are distribution independent like Nix and Guix (not NixOS and Guix System as linux distributions themselves but Nix and Guix as package managers that work on any other distribution including Fedora)
• Container workflows like Distrobox, Toolbox, or Dev Containers

and why should I bother with packaging something into RPM when it is already available in either of these options.