Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 2:55 UTC (Tue) by BradReed (subscriber, #5917)
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

I don't think I understand this well at all, as it seems to require a massive developer buy-in, or a massive distro buy-in to make things work.

Say some game company writes a new game they distribute via Steam or HumbleBundle. How is this made into a "runtime?" Who keeps it updated?

If Kovid Goyal releases a new version of Calibre every week, who makes the "runtime?"

I personally don't see the problem this runtime-based system is "fixing."

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 3:32 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

In the case of Steam the runtime is probably Ubuntu where as for Calibre maybe the runtime is also Ubuntu or maybe it is Fedora because that's supporting some newer infrastructure that Calibre uses which is different than what Steam tests against. The problem this is fixing is allowing you the flexibility to have shared per-application user spaces so to be able to mix and match, running bleeding edge dependencies for one application without forcing upgrade or breaking your other applications and without the overhead of VMs.