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.
YASM is unmaintained upstream currently, but it’s still used to compile assembly sources in 12 Fedora packages, including critical ones like Firefox. Last release was in July 2019 and last commit was in June 2024. Issues are left unresolved and pull requests unreviewed. It is getting dropped from other distributions already. In contrast, NASM is still maintained, with last release in April 2024 and last commit in November 2024 with no indication of upstream abandoning development. Most, if not all upstreams support building using NASM already, so the proposal is to switch their build dependency to NASM instead.
Feedback
Benefit to Fedora
Switching to compiling assembly sources with NASM ensures (critical) applications are built with a maintained assembler.
Scope
Proposal owners:
Open pull requests to switch BuildRequires: yasm to nasm or make the changes directly where permitted.
Mark yasm as deprecated by adding Provides: deprecated(yasm)
Work with affected package maintainers and upstreams to ensure they build with nasm correctly.
Other developers: Affected package maintainers are encouraged (but not required) to ensure their packages build with nasm instead of yasm.
Release engineering: N/A (not a System-wide Change)
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 (not needed for this Change)
Upgrade/compatibility impact
No new packages should require yasm to build as it will be marked as deprecated. Existing packages will be built using nasm going forward. The change should be transparent to users.
How To Test
fedrq wrsrc -s yasm -F name returns no packages depending on yasm to build.
User Experience
There should be no noticeable user impact.
Dependencies
Contingency Plan
Contingency mechanism: Revert BuildRequires: back to yasm and remove the deprecation.
Contingency deadline: Final Freeze
Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Documentation
N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Release Notes
YASM assembler has been deprecated and all packages that required it to build are now built using NASM.
If you are in favor but have reservations, or are opposed but something could change your mind, please explain in a reply.
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Does Firefox (identified as using yasm), officially support using nasm as an alternative? While I have personally been involved in moving some non-Fedora packages to nasm from yasm, I would not want to build something as important to the community as Firefox using an unsupported (by the upstream) assembler.
Deprecating it to prevent additional packages to be introduced using yasm seems quite appropriate moving forward (as long as FESCo can waive the deprecation for some future introduced critical packages, should they happen (which seems unlikely, but…)).
I wouldn’t worry about firefox too much: it is probably calling the assembler in a fixed way and as long as yasm works it works, and even if yasm is buggy, those bugs don’t matter. So I guess it’s fine if firefox keeps using it for a while.
Just a reminder. And because I still have a vested intrest in my xul codebase. If YASM is gone then that means the Unified XUL Platform and dirivatives will not be able to natively build on Fedora anymore without also having to provide yasm. Which sucks because Python 2 is also gone missing. Surpised GTK2 is still around.
It’s not gone, it’s just deprecated, meaning no new packages should depend on it. You could pick up maintenance of the yasm package if you need it.
Wish I could. I’m 3/4ths blackballed as it is in fedora land. I can provide it for my self since I have rpmbuild capabilities. Might share the repo.
Besides it is all old and insecure anyway and don’t even know if the real reason is no one can be bothered to patch for GCC 15 or not.. Seems to have caused a lot of “legacy” casualties.
Summary
instead of reiterating. You can even do this by email, by replying with the heart emoji or just “+1”. This will make long topics easier to follow.