Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 9, 2022 14:55 UTC (Sat) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622)
In reply to: Distributors entering Flatpakland by pabs
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

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.

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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.