Copr Modularity, the End of an Era

23. 10. 2024 | Jakub Kadlčík | EN copr fedora modularity

Our team has put a lot of effort into the possibility of building modules in Copr. This feature went through many iterations and rewrites from scratch as the concepts, requirements, and goals of Fedora Modularity kept changing. This will be my last article about this topic because we are planning to drop Modularity and all of its functionality from Copr. The only exception are Module hotfixes, which are staying for good.

Why?

The Fedora Modularity project never really took off, and building modules in Copr even less so. We’ve had only 14 builds in the last two years. It’s not feasible to maintain the code for so few users. Modularity has also been retired since Fedora 39 and will die with RHEL 9.

Additionally, one of our larger goals for the upcoming years is to start using Pulp as a storage for all Copr build results. This requires rewriting several parts of the backend code. Factoring in reimplementation for module builds would result in many development hours wasted for very little benefit. All projects with modules will remain in the current storage until the Modularity is finally dropped.

Schedule

In the ideal world, we would keep the feature available as long as RHEL 9 is supported, but we cannot wait until 2032.

Communication

It was me who introduced all the Modularity code into Copr, so it should also be me who decommissions it. Feel free to ping me directly if you have any questions or concerns, but you are also welcome to reach out on the Copr Matrix channel, mailing list, or in the form of GitHub issues. In the meantime, I will contact everybody who submitted a module build in Copr in the past two years and make sure they don’t rely on this feature.