LWN: Comments on "An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME"

An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME

ploxiln — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 06:03:09 +0000

> You should also know, however, that the snap package is limited in what it can do. You will not be configuring this installation nearly as much as you would the standard installation. Because of this, I will give you the step-by-step for installing Nextcloud manually.

The manual steps were alternative to, not for, the snap install. Indeed, it wouldn't make sense for a snap package to use the host system PHP.

An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME

callegar — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:59:13 +0000

In a conventional distro this may happen if someone gives you a PDF and you had never seen one before. But every application producing PDFs would likely suggest a PDF viewer at install time, so you can install both together and avoid the need to have your users searching for a suitable program at inconvenient times.

In fact, my question was triggered by the instructions I found on the net for installing nextcloud as a snap in ubuntu (https://www.linux.com/learn/how-install-nextcloud-server-...) which made me a bit worried about the management of strict dependencies and suggested companion packages in a flatpack and snap world. For instance, you install the nextcloud snap, but this gives you nothing useful yet. Because you need to realize and satisfy all the dependencies yourself. You need a web server (and most likely not just a web server, but Apache and in a specific version range, if you want everything to work without tweaks), then you need a DB (in fact mysql), and a specific version of PHP. But still you do not have anything functional. You need to collect some error logs or read some deployment instructions to realize that PHP misses some packages and, one by one, see that they are zip, dom, xml writer and reader, gd, curl, mdstring. Seems fairly more complex on the admin than what traditional packaging with automatic management of dependencies would be. Obviously this could be solved by having the nextcloud "package" contain a full AMP stack and all the needed php packages, but this has other inconveniences. It is true that things have always worked in this way on OSs with no package management, but I was wondering if some better solution was in the work for flatpack or snap.

An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME

mathstuf — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:16:07 +0000

No different than if it wants to open a PDF and you don't have a viewer? "No suitable program could be found, would you like to search for one?".

An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME

callegar — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 10:23:52 +0000

> For instance, if the user clicks on a hyperlink in a sandboxed office application, there would need to be some interprocess communication (IPC) interface in place to open up that link in a web browser.

How can one be sure that there is a web browser at all in a system that is meant by design to have no dependencies? How does that app specify that it may need to open links at install time so that one, when installing it, knows he'll need a browser as well?

An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME

mathstuf — Sat, 16 Jul 2016 10:54:32 +0000

They will be, but the app will access them via /run/user/$UID/doc (it has a mount namespace). At least that's how I read it.

An initial release of Flatpak portals for GNOME

micka — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 15:59:26 +0000

> Documents created by the application are stored in a FUSE filesystem mounted inside the sandbox at /run/user/$UID/doc/ so that the application can continue to access them. The FUSE filesystem will also be mounted outside the sandbox, making it accessible with other, non-sandboxed programs.

That seems really awkward, unless I misunderstood.
Those files will not be with the user's other files, in $HOME?
And is the fuse fs only mounted during the time the application is running? If so, the files can't be accessed by those "other, non-sandboxed programs" unless the flatpak program is running?

Thanks Nathan

ovitters — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:26:03 +0000

Very cool, I tried reading up on the Portals, but did not knew about these details. Pretty surprised than LWN knows so much more on a topic I'm interested in! Shared the subscriber link on Google+. Hopefully it'll result in a few more people sponsoring LWN work.