Upstream not necessarily better in this case ?

Posted Feb 8, 2023 15:22 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
In reply to: Upstream not necessarily better in this case ? by wjt
Parent article: Fedora packages versus upstream Flatpaks

OK thanks. I don't find this convenient at all to have to list available versions and copy-paste commit IDs instead of being able to download a versionned image from a repository and install it on all your systems. And does it work from an internal network ? Or maybe it requires to set up dedicated caches and the likes ? Doesn't sound appealing at first glance :-/

Upstream not necessarily better in this case ?

Posted Feb 8, 2023 21:57 UTC (Wed) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link] (1 responses)

It's definitely not super convenient to work with commit IDs. Flatpak uses ostree for the repository. ostree is modeled on git and in a local repository you can do things like ref^^, but I doubt that flatpak handles that. Each commit has a parent and you can walk the ref just like in git. You don't have to remove anything at all if you don't want to.

However, since what you're committing can be pretty massive, it's pretty typical to prune the repos. At Endless I think we currently have all of our repos setup to prune after a depth of 4 commits and there's a job that prunes them all daily. Our repos are a fraction of the size of flathub's, too.

One thing that's lacking in ostree relative to git is tags. At Endless when we make releases I made up a custom to create a ref under release/ pointing to the released commit. A fake tag if you will. Then you can always pull release/os/eos/amd64/4.0.13 or whatever. That works well for our OS, but there we're a lot more disciplined with version numbers. When we used to do more Flatpak apps, people did not want to make up release version numbers. They just wanted to pump out the next update.

Flathub is similar. There is a version number shown, but it's optional and it's the usually the upstream version recorded in the commit. There aren't any tagged commits.

Upstream not necessarily better in this case ?

Posted Feb 10, 2023 6:11 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

That seems quite small, compared to Debian, which still makes available all source/binaries that have been published since 2005, plus some from the releases before that.