[Beowulf] flatpack

[John Hearns]

Having used Snaps on Ubuntu - which seems to be their preferred method of
distributing some applications,
I have a slightly different take on the containerisation angle and would
de-emphaise that.

My take is that snaps/flatpak attack the "my distro ships with gcc version
4.1 but I need gcc version 8.0"
By that I mean that you replace the distro shipped gcc version at your
peril - as far as I am concerned tiknering
with the tested/approved gcc and glibc will end you in a world of hurt.
(old war story - changing bash to an upgraded version left a big SuSE
system unbootable for me).

So with snaps/flatpak you should be able to give your users and developers
up to date applications without fooling with
the core system utilities. And this is a Good Thing (TM)







On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 06:47, Chris Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> wrote:

> On 22/7/19 10:40 pm, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
>
> > So in a nut shell this is taking dockerization/ containerization and
> > making it more for the every day Linux user instead of the HPC user?
>
> I don't think this goes as far as containers with isolation, as I think
> that's not what they're trying to do. But it does seem they're thinking
> along those lines.
>
> > It would be interesting to have a distro built around such a setup.
>
> I think this is targeting cross-distro applications.  With all the
> duplication of libraries, etc, a distro using it would be quite bulky.
>
> Also may you have a similar security as containers have, whereby when a
> vulnerability is found and patched in an application or library you end
> up with lots of people out there still running the vulnerable version.
>
> This is why distros tend to discourage "vendoring" of libraries as that
> tends to fossilise vulnerabilities into an application whereas if people
> use the version provided in the distro the maintainers only need to fix
> it in that one package and everyone who links against it benefits.
>
> All the best,
> Chris
> --
>   Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Berkeley, CA, USA
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