[GTALUG] Flatpak: Anyone with Experience or Opinions on It?

[David Collier-Brown]

On 03/11/17 11:33 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> | Subject: [GTALUG] Flatpak: Anyone with Experience or Opinions on It?
>
> |  It looks like it may have been
> | developed by people associated with Fedora and may be a replacement for
> | RPM, APT, and the like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak).
> |
> | In any case, has anyone on this list looked at this or used it? Is it
> | any good? Is it a good replacement for RPM or APT? Am I off-track here
> | asking that question?
>
> I have not (knowingly) used this technology.  But Here's my take
> anyway (based on guess-work!):
>
> Packaging like dpkg and rpm is fine but the result is tied to a
> release of a distro.  The main reason is that the shared libraries are
> partially bound into the binary package.  But there are other subtle
> and annoying difference between distros that are visible to programs.
>
> Packaging little virtual machines is way more portable but somewhat
> expensive and awkward.  This is reasonable for a service but not most
> programs.
>
> Various folks have tried to find a middle ground.  The barriers are
> market buy-in, not technology.  There are two that I'm aware of:
>
> - Canonical's "snap"
>
> - "flatpak" sponsored by Red Hat
>
There's actually an NP_complete problem hiding in the process of 
avoiding needing two different versions of a library, and numerous 
people have tried to avoid it by

- inventing an OS-level mechanism

- moving individual instances of the problem into different virtual machines

- restricting the danger area to only one language

This has motivated part of the flatpack and related work: for more info 
that you wanted, see also 
https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/dll-hell-and-avoiding-an-np-complete-problem/


--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain