Did you evaluate flatpak/appimage/snap before developing XARs? If so, what were the shortcomings that you noticed in them?
I have found reasonably good success with snap on Python and node apps, but am not an expert on them. Just want to know from other practitioners about any gotchas that others might have studied/stumbled upon.
Thanks!
XAR doesn't aim to, say, represent a sandboxed filesystem or provide some isolation or provide a specification for GUI apps to seamlessly integrate with your desktop. Instead, the main idea is to just get a single file that, when run, mounts a filesystem and runs a command inside it. In my mind, at least, it's a simpler, smaller primitive you could build other systems on top of (like we have with deploying Python, Lua, and Node).