Re: Thoughts on "Linux Apps" paper

[Michael Thayer <michael thayer oracle com>]

Just a short follow-up for today.  Many (though not all) of the upstream 
changes which are needed to turn an application into an "app" as 
described here will also make it easier to package in a traditional 
Linux distribution way, which is likely to make them more palatable to a 
wider range of people.  And an important usage case for apps (without a 
sand box!) in a free software context which may not immediately spring 
to mind (or then again) is testing bug fixes for applications which a 
Linux distribution user normally runs in a version packaged by their 
distribution in an un-bureaucratic way without removing the existing 
distribution version.

Regards,

Michael

On 20/06/13 23:17, Michael Thayer wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> Alexander Larsson pointed me to the "Linux Apps" paper after I asked him
> some questions regarding his "Glick2" project.  I am sure you have had
> no shortage of thoughts and feedback on the paper, but as that is the
> price you have to pay for working in the public eye I would still like
> to add a bit of my own from the perspective of a developer with some
> experience of packaging out-of-distribution software on Linux, and some
> interest in the subject.
>
> An important point I would like to make is that many of the goals you
> set in the paper are actually possible today.  Usually in rather
> inelegant ways, and perhaps not quite the way you envision them in the
> paper, but possible nonetheless.  You can create an app in the style of
> an OS X application bundle.  The app needs some way of finding its
> resources relative to the executable.  This can be solved without
> mounting tricks, see "gnulib"[1] for example.  Obviously this will not
> work without modifying the programme source, but since I presume that
> the majority of software you are targeting is either open source or
> packaged by the author of the software getting modifications upstream
> should be quite feasible.  Again OS X-like, the app will need to be run
> through the file manager the first time a user executes it (but since
> they have just installed it by copying it that is not such a burden); on
> first execution the app sets up any user-local search path directories
> to point to it.  For example (example, not recommendation), the app can
> put a symbolic link to its icon in ${HOME}/.icons.  And of course
> application sand boxes can be done relatively transparently - as a proof
> of concept from my corner (you would probably want to use a different
> method in practice!) see VirtualBox in seamless mode, which works fine
> for X11 applications - no Wayland needed here.  (I realise that some of
> our Guest Additions tools could do with some polishing; a better
> seamless mode is on my personal to-do list, though with no date set for
> completion.  I hope to make the code as generic as possible to make as
> much as possible usable in other sand box contexts.)
>
> To make a long story short, as well as planning ways to make apps
> possible in the future, it might make sense to catalogue best practices
> for doing them now.  That is a goal you could reach a lot faster, and
> once you have such a catalogue and people start looking at it I suspect
> that they will also start finding ways of doing it better now and start
> fixing the bits of the system which get in their way.
>
> I have quite a bit more that I could write, but this e-mail is already
> long enough and it is getting rather late in this time zone.  If the
> list subscribers are not too annoyed at me yet (please let me know!) I
> plan to follow it some time with a more detailed look at individual
> points of the paper.
>
> Thank you for your patience.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
>
> [1]
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Supporting-Relocation.html


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