undefined | Better HN

0 pointszorr2y ago0 comments

> That's kinda what the distros ARE

For the base system and libraries, yes. But why should the distro maintainers be burdened with additional work for every possible enduser application out there? If I write a GTK app and want to make it available for Ubuntu/Debian users through official repositories, I need to make sure it gets added to the official package list, and every time I make a new release, someone else somewhere else has to do additional work just to repackage the application so it is available in the repository.

Maybe a far-fetched analogy, but imagine if browser maintainers have to perform additional work every time a new website launches before it is available to its users.

Also, in this system, the application developer has a lot of extra work for making the application run and build against older versions of its dependencies. If I want to make my app available for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS which has libadwaita 1.1, I cannot use any of the new widgets in libadwaita 1.2 (released 6 months ago) or 1.3 (released earlier this month). I can use those widgets but I'll have to write ifdefs and provide fallback behavior/widgets when building/running against these older versions. I will also have to manually track the various distro versions to detect when I can remove the fallbacks from my codebase.

This is what Flatpak is for. Using Flatpak I can target a specific GNOME SDK version and make use of all the new code immediately, without having to write fallbacks. The downside is that when a user downloads my application through Flathub or another Flatpak repository, it might have to download the additional libraries as well, but they will be the correct versions and they won't be downloaded if that SDK is already available due to other Flatpak applications already installed.

Essentially, something like Flatpak is a middle-ground solution that trades of some disk space for the benefit of less work for distro maintainers (so they can focus on core packages) and less work for application developers (that can use more recent dependency versions and don't have to worry about the versions in other distro's)

0 comments

JohnFen2y ago

> If I write a GTK app and want to make it available for Ubuntu/Debian users through official repositories, I need to make sure it gets added to the official package list, and every time I make a new release, someone else somewhere else has to do additional work just to repackage the application so it is available in the repository.

Yes, and that's a good thing for a whole bunch of reasons.

If you don't want to leave it up to the distro maintainers, nothing's stopping you from standing up your own repo to distribute your software to a particular distro. It's a one-liner for users to add your repo to their list so they can use their package manager to install and update your software as usual.

> Essentially, something like Flatpak is a middle-ground solution

Yes, I get that it's convenient for maintainers. But it kinda sucks for users (at least for me), which is why I avoid using software packaged that way.

I'll give flatpack this much credit, though -- it's not a nightmare like snaps are.

wander_homer2y ago

> Yes, I get that it's convenient for maintainers. But it kinda sucks for users (at least for me), which is why I avoid using software packaged that way.

My browser, mail client, rss reader, music player, video player, image viewer, steam, ... all have been working incredibly well as Flatpaks. I also get free sandboxing for all of them, so for example Steam and its games, don't have access to my ssh and gpg keys or documents.

The only applications which don't work that well with Flatpak are things like my IDE or file manager.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse