Changes/FlatpaksNoPpc64le

Stop building Flatpaks for PPC64LE

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary

We will stop building the Fedora Flatpak runtimes and applications for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture.

Users of Flatpaks on ppc64le will have to switch back to the corresponding Fedora RPM package.

Owner

• Name: Yaakov Selkowitz
• Email: yselkowitz@fedoraproject.org

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 42
• Last updated: 2025-01-10
• Announced
• Discussion thread
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Flatpaks were enabled for ppc64le as of Fedora 39 because the Atomic Desktops were available thereon and were going to include flatpak versions of applications in their ISOs rather than as RPMs inside of the ostree. (Fedora 39 was also the first version where building flatpaks for ppc64le was feasible, as previous versions relied on different tooling which used OSBS to build images.) However, flatpak builds on ppc64le have been consistently slower than x86_64 and aarch64, and a significant number of applications cannot be built on ppc64le (for example, anything based on QtWebEngine).

With Atomic Desktops for ppc64le being proposed for removal in a separate Change, and extremely few overall users of any desktop variants on this architecture (per discussion on said change), there would appear to be no further need for Flatpaks to be built for ppc64le either.

Feedback

None so far.

Benefit to Fedora

Not building for ppc64le means faster builds, less infrastructure load, and less maintenance. We can focus on the architectures where hardware is more easily available and where we have a lot of users already (i.e. x86_64 and aarch64).

Scope

• Proposal owners: Remove the ppc64le architecture from flatpak-runtime-scripts, and create PRs for releng changes.
• Other developers: N/A
• Release engineering: #12517
• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
• Alignment with the Fedora Strategy: N/A

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Users of Flatpaks on ppc64le will have to switch back to installing the RPM in a package mode installation, or adding packages to their own images using Bootable Containers which are available for ppc64le.

Note that this change is only about the Flatpak runtime and application images and thus all the RPM packages will still be available.

Early Testing (Optional)

N/A

How To Test

N/A

User Experience

N/A

Dependencies

Changes/AtomicDesktopsNoPpc64le

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) No change will be made, and Flatpaks will continue to be built for ppc64le.
• Contingency deadline: Final freeze
• Blocks release? No

Documentation

Fedora Flatpaks are no longer built for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture.

Release Notes

Fedora Flatpaks are no longer built for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture.