Re: Application bundles in Gnome OS

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2012-09-06 at 13:08 -0400, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> I don't think glick2 is a perfect fit as is. It has some weak aspects,
> like the lack of sandboxing and an over-reliance on fuse (with
> possible performance/robustness/security issues), and some strong ones
> (support for integrating apps with the desktop (desktop files,
> mimetypes, etc) and in-memory deduplication of files). I'd like to
> hear some implementation details on what Lennart has been looking at
> though. Maybe we can merge the best from both worlds. See [1] for
> techincal details on Glick2.

I just wrote a different, extremely minimal approach to a bundling
system:

https://github.com/alexlarsson/bundler

It basically just loopback mounts a squashfs file in a private mount
namespace in a hardcoded place and execs a hardcoded binary name from
it. There is no desktop integration and no other flexibility, although
things like that *could* be introduced by a separate daemon that
extracts metadata from "installed" bundles.

Not sure this is exactly what we want either, but it might be
interesting to compare and contrast.