A Quick Introduction to Flatpak
apebox.org
apebox.org
Between that and wayland being ready for showtime, I think the future of linux looks pretty good!
Banshee was badly hit by this, around the time it was under discussion as the default music player in Ubuntu - an innocent SQLite point release completely crippled the random button (30 second delays on next track, on a small library). Bundling would have avoided it, the distro model is why end users hit it. And anyone who's ever managed a Jenkins install knows minor point release updates can completely fuck the world (since so few Jenkins addins are subject to adequate CI)
I'm not new to the problem at hand, I've been packaging .NET apps on Linux for a decade. But this is the reality of where we are, especially when distro maintainers (quite reasonably) only want to ship one major version of any given library at once, and you just can't make any assumptions about your base system. Bundling means you can actually ship a _product_, and train your support staff on a single configuration that everyone will experience.
No, it isn't. See how Nix and GNU Guix solve this problem without resorting to bundling. Shipping a single binary to all systems is the use-case of proprietary software. Free software just needs distros that are more capable, that can handle multiple versions of the same dependencies, like Nix and Guix do. Bundling may be convenient, but it's harmful to the users.
C'mon, I _know_ bundling has issues, but it's like writing about the comparative merits of two cars, and someone saying hippos are cool. It's a non-sequitur. Wrapping up "configure && make && make install" in some Guile doesn't make it a useful answer.
You can use whatever dependencies you'd like with Nix and Guix, that's a big reason for them to exist in the first place. To attempt to translate into Flatpak terms, the "common" runtime would be whatever part of the dependency graph you share with the upstream package collection. Share as little or as much as you'd like, you know the trade-offs.
>Wrapping up "configure && make && make install" in some Guile doesn't make it a useful answer.
Now you're just being demeaning and dishonest. You could insult any package manager by saying it's just a wrapper around make.
If I can't rely on _specific versions_, I have gained nothing at all vs. using .deb. API changes are a real issue. Shit really does just suddenly break. Automake 1.11.2 arbitrarily removed something relied on mostly by GUI .NET apps (and also GRUB) - how would I have been able to anticipate that if I have no control over the build system being used during app installation? Changes to default GCC flags have broken Mono's garbage collector in the past. How can I be sure changes to the underlying libraries and toolchain _not provided by me_ won't break my app's installation or use by my users? I can't. So now I'm on a distro churn wheel, but where the target distro has almost no users, no traction, no user acceptance, no institutional knowledge, and a crap first-run UX that involves mangling bashrc.
Sorry, but it's just not up to scratch, and I would have scrubbed a project to use Guix within a week.
You can rely on specific versions of software build with specific dependencies, each using specific configure flags, a specific build system, etc. This is one of the major improvements over traditional system package managers that Guix and Nix offer. Both package managers, like Flatpak, can be used on top of any existing GNU/Linux distrubution, BTW, so you don't have to use a distro that so greatly offends like you like the one I help develop. You've drawn a whole lot of conclusions without knowing the facts and have been pretty rude in the process.
Isn't that what you literally do in Nix and GNU Guix? You can create packages with specific versions of all your dependencies and use that for your package. I think by default they try to package and build with latest but can create packages for specific versions if needed.
If you run Windows, OS X, Android, or iOS it's 100% likely that you have several different versions of some C library that have known vulnerabilities in them. Think about things like proprietary games that aren't updated often, if ever, where things like libpng and stuff get bundled in. When the upstream libpng developers release a security fix, do the game developers release a new version of the game with that fix included? Almost certainly not. This is the problem with bundling. You are dependent on N upstreams for security updates to any given non-core library. It's a rampant problem, and it's a problem that GNU/Linux distributions address for the safety of their users.
>For example, when the "gotofail" bug was discovered in the OS X system crypto frameworks, Apple issued an OS update that ended the story right there.
Right, that is good. All of the applications were dynamically linked against the system's openssl, so the security update was easy. But only a few things are like that on these proprietary operating systems. GNU/Linux distributions, on the other hand, have this property for all software. It's absolutely crucial for user security.
Asking users to install these new Flatpak/Snappy/Docker things is asking them to accept a bunch of software known to be insecure. Running vulnerable software in a container doesn't make it much better. We need to develop systems that make it easier to run software that has all of the latest security patches. Tools like Flatpak are a bold step backwards.
Also Flatpak does contain the extent of damage by putting the application in a sandbox - different in implementation detail but hardly different conceptually than how Apple "app store" apps likewise run sandboxed with minimal interaction between apps allowed.
I mean an application that breaks sucks, and you might have to roll back an update or wait for a patch. It is annoying and you may lose some time.
A security breach may be more rare, but it also might be much more damaging. You might lose your whole business or worse.
The right answer is probably some subtle equation of both problems relative to one's specific circumstances (trade offs) but "it depends" never makes for a good internet argument so most people don't bother with the nuances.
Rolling back is not nearly dangerous as you are implying in a curated distribution.
Snap on the other hand is actually shipping docker into production.
Ubuntu's snappy is the obviously snap-named flatpak competitor, and it doesn't appear to me to do an awful lot with Docker?