Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 9, 2022 2:55 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

I'd love to see Debian automatically convert all its .deb files to Flatpak, as well as to have ostree results for debootstrap/mmdebstrap. I think the right method is one Flatpak runtime per app containing the app itself and all of its dependencies and then one Flatpak "app" that is just symlinks into the runtime. This is needed due to Flatpak using /app instead of /usr inside app containers. Since Flatpak deduplicates all files using ostree, the storage requirements wouldn't be much more than a regular .deb install and it sounds like Flatpak/ostree would scale up to this many runtimes just fine.

This would mean you could easily install older or newer apps that are ABI-incompatible with your system libraries, or you could install Debian apps on other distros fairly easily. The ostree results would enable easy bisecting, which currently requires lots of debootstrap/upgrade runs.

https://manpages.debian.org/debbisect
https://wiki.debian.org/BisectDebian

to post comments

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 9, 2022 14:55 UTC (Sat) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link] (2 responses)

This was basically how we did Flatpak's circa 2016 at Endless. The runtime was built just like our OS starting with debootstrap and ending in an ostree commit. Apps were just packages (with some horrifying debhelper/dpkg hacks I wrote) that were then converted to an ostree commit with the appropriate flatpak metadata.

It... mostly worked, but it was fragile and having to go through the Debian packaging flow to make apps was definitely not what our app developers wanted. Eventually our runtime was changed to be based on the Freedesktop runtime just like GNOME and the other folks. Our apps got converted to be build with flatpak-builder just like on Flathub.

These days we're mostly out of the apps game with our developers working on Flathub as needed.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 10, 2022 3:26 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Did the tool you use to make runtimes and apps survive? How did you deal with not having things like apt/dpkg in the app containers? Sounds like you didn't have a large .deb app package community to start with, so I think your situation would be different to Debian. Switching Debian to package things as flatpak instead of .deb wouldn't scale and would alienate folks who dislike flatpak, while auto-convert would be doable for us I think. What kind of fragility did you see?

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 10, 2022 3:28 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The mention of debhelper makes it sound like you were recompiling apps from source to change the /usr prefix to /app but my proposal is to just workaround the kludgy prefix Flatpak uses by adding symlinks.