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

[Myles Braithwaite 👾]

John Sellens via talk wrote:
> I've long found it disappointing the way shared libraries are dealt with
> in linux and other OSs.
> 
> To me, the obvious solutions is to install every library into a directory
> named for the version, or name the library itself with a version number.
> Then, if you wish, a default version can be chosen and linked/symlinked
> into the default directory.
> 
> That way, a program that wants a particular version gives the
> compiler/linker the appropriate search path to find the preferred version.
> 
> And of course, once you've built a working version, you can choose to
> static link it rather than use shared libraries.
> 
> We solved this in the obvious way at UWaterloo in the late 1980's (as
> part of xhier).  I still shake my head that this kind of thing is still
> a problem.

Speaking largely from my experience with Node.js this doesn't work so
while in practice. It becomes a major headache for "pr developers"[0]
and users.

pr developers have to use libraries that they aren't 100% sure what the
current feature set is and known bugs are. This creates a bunch of patch
libraries, to back port existing features and bug fixes to the project
and then you have dependencies hell.

Users don't like it because it requires extra space to have multiple
version of the same library. Especially when it comes to minor version
releases. And it's getting quite common for people to run out of disk
space again (the average laptop SSD is ~500GB and photos, videos, games,
and even applications have gotten a lot large in the past five years).

The only place this type of system works is in monolithic repos where
the entire source is under one umbrella, ala Facebook and Google (and
maybe Mozilla).[1][2][3]

[0]: pr developers - people who aren't major contributors on a project
but will submit a Pull Request.

[1]:
<https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext>

[2]: <https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2014/09/09/on-monolithic-repositories/>

[3]:
<https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/>