Re: All stable flatpak builds moved to flathub

[Simon McVittie <smcv collabora com>]

On Mon, 13 Nov 2017 at 12:11:04 +0100, Alexandre Franke wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> > The goal of flathub (https://flathub.org/) is to be a single location
> > where you can find builds of the latest stable version of linux desktop
> > applications, ideally maintained by the upstream author. That way the
> > experience for flatpak users is much nicer, just add one remote and you
> > can then find all apps via e.g. gnome-software.
>
> Such centralisation means a single point of failure. By supporting the
> addition of remotes, flatpak seemed to have potential for
> decentralisation. Is some kind of federation or other way to address
> this issue on the roadmap?

The flatpak tool and library already support just as much federation as
e.g. apt, git or jhbuild- you can add as many remotes as you want. Apps
and their runtimes don't even have to come from the same place:
for example, an app that is not hosted on Flathub itself can use the
freedesktop and GNOME runtimes from Flathub.

If there is something else that you think flatpak should do to support
federation, I'd suggest opening a feature request.

That doesn't mean that some level of centralization isn't helpful from a
UX point of view. Analogously, GNOME uses decentralized tools (git,
jhbuild and a web browser), but requires official GNOME modules to
be hosted on git.gnome.org, track their bugs on Bugzilla and release via
download.gnome.org; apt can install packages from anywhere, but Debian
doesn't really support installations where packages didn't all come
from the Debian archive, and Ubuntu doesn't really support installations
where packages didn't all come from the Ubuntu archive; and so on.

    smcv