logoalt Hacker News

scrivanodevlast Tuesday at 6:07 PM1 replyview on HN

I can only speak for Flatpak, but I found its packaging workflow and restricted runtime terrible to work with. Lots of undocumented/hard to find behaviour and very painful to integrate with existing package managers (e.g. vcpkg).


Replies

yjftsjthsd-hlast Tuesday at 6:42 PM

Yeah, flatpak has some good ideas, and they're even mostly well executed, but once you start trying to build your own flatpaks or look under the hood there's a lot of "magic". (Examples: Where do runtimes come from? I couldn't find any docs other than a note that says to not worry about it because you should never ever try to make your own, and I couldn't even figure out the git repos that appear to create the official ones. How do you build software? Well, mostly you plug it into the existing buildsystems and hope that works, though I mostly resorted to `buildsystem: simple` and doing it by hand.) For bonus points, I'm pretty sure 1. flatpaks are actually pretty conceptually simple; the whole base is in /usr and the whole app is in /app and that's it, and 2. the whole thing could have been a thin wrapper over docker/podman like x11docker taken in a slightly different direction.

show 3 replies