Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 10, 2022 20:22 UTC (Sun) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672)
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

You lose all the advantages of having a curated repository. I suspect flatpack land is gonna be like npm land, full of broken insecure bullshit.

to post comments

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 12:36 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

As far as I can tell this is humanity having to relearn all the lessons that the 'previous generations' had to learn themselves. You can tell someone about all the problems they are going to walk into, but the human brain is built to skip all that until it lives those events itself. So the game for all of these repositories goes as follows:

1. New people hate dealing with the old way of doing things and want to do something different.
2. They build a bunch of tools in a new way and pile out their repositories with all those things.
3. Older people point out that their will be problems and if they did this or that they would be better off.
4. New people usually respond with 'this time it will be different.'
5. It isn't different and then the generation afterwards comes up with a curated method to deal with the pile of software.
6. They build businesses on this and get settled into their ways.
7. Goto 1.

Having now lived through different developer generations who have practiced the following:
download someone's prebuilt tarball and install it. Cant fix the code so suffer
download someone's source code and build it
upload that code to some central place for people but then find ftp site full of crap
come up with debs and rpms to help deal with updates and see what was built with built
find that ends up with dependency hell
come up with apt/yum/etc to deal with dependency hell
find out that people are building repos willy nilly and stuff is now broken between repos
try to figure that out with modules and other tooling
decide that all that is too much work and pile up all the prebuilt code into a container.
...

I expect that we will go through various solutions until curated containers will be replaced by the next 'tarball' layer.. probably someone's uploaded datacentre.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 16:19 UTC (Mon) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

> As far as I can tell this is humanity having to relearn all the lessons that the 'previous generations' had to learn themselves.

This sort of bundling and unbundling cycle has been going on forever in all sorts of places. I could just as easily shift your argument by half a wavelength and then I'd be grumbling about how the young ones refuse to see the hard learned benefits of bundling instead (it might sound a bit like someone complaining about npm).

It sure is a lucky coincidence that the generation of tools you grew up with and are most used to happen to be the ones where the cycle ends, we Finally Got It Right, made the perfect tradeoffs and there is little left to improve upon (:

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 16:41 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

No, sorry I don't think we got it right.. I just didn't want to spend 600 lines going over every other tool system which has followed the same path.

I also did not come in when the tools were right, I came in when everything was unbundled and you downloaded various 'tarballs' from websites and hoped it worked on your system. I then went through most of the joys of 'oooh I get this so much faster and easier' to 'ooooh I get to rebuild all this and make it work the way I want it' to 'ooooh now I have to figure out how I made this 6 months ago because the backups ate themselves and I need to restore this site.' Each of them had their own positives and negatives. Each had their 'stop talking at me old person, just because you had problems then doesn't mean I will now'

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 22:07 UTC (Mon) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

Flathub is like that, but that isn't what this article is about. You'd be installing and updating your packages from a distribution curated repository. Specifically that part isn't different.