Re: [Evolution] Have I pushed Evolution beyond where it is designed to go?

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Mon, 2022-11-07 at 16:17 -0600, Tim McConnell via evolution-list
wrote:
> On Mon, 2022-11-07 at 16:34 -0500, Paul Smith wrote:
> > I'm not sure I understand this comment.  The whole point of flatpak
> > (and snap) is that it's not _supposed_ to need to worry about the
> > dependencies of the distribution.  That's why you'd use it.
> Which is why they are bad ideas to use. There is no way that ARCH or
> Gentoo or Kali use the same dependencies. It's called "Dependency
> Hell" and the theory of FlatPack and SNAP not needing to follow or
> use a distributions is like walking into a [...]

I'm not interested in continuing that unpleasant analogy but I think
you're confused about what flatpak and snap are and what they do. 
There _are_ reasons to want to avoid them, such as startup time and
disk space usage, perhaps memory usage, and, possibly, efficiency of
delivering security updates (but so far that has not been a problem).

However "dependency hell" is absolute NOT one of the reasons to avoid
them: "dependency hell" is exactly what these tools were invented to
solve, and they do solve it very well.

They basically provide a fully self-contained package containing a tool
(like Evolution) and ALL of its dependencies, as a single bundle. 
These dependencies are not installed separately on your system: they
are not visible to any other program "outside" the flatpak.  And the
Evolution in the flatpak doesn't use any of your system libraries, it
only uses the libraries in the flatpak.  So there's no way they can
introduce dependency hell.

As mentioned I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 which has a similar vintage of
Gnome desktop and apps, including Evolution, that the Debian stable in
question uses.  And the flatpak version of Evolution 3.46 works great
on my system.

And if it doesn't work, well, it's a self-contained separate bundle so
you can either just ignore it, or remove it: it doesn't interfere with
anything else on the system.  That's the point.

> It's WHY I run Debian, I can set up the system how I want and just
> upgrade to the newer version. No disk reformat etc etc.

Sure; I used Debian, including testing and sid, for a number of years
(5+) before I got tired of the arbitrary release cycle and switched to
Ubuntu. Ubuntu also does not require disk reformats.

These days even the recent RedHat Enterprise distros can do an upgrade
without reformatting the disk (finally!).