[Beowulf] flatpack

[John Hearns]

Having just spouted on about snaps/flatpak I saw on the roadmap for AWS
Firecracker that snap support is to be included.
Sorry that I am conflating snap and flatpak.

On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 07:06, John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:

> 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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