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