extensions like xdg-app

[Robert McQueen <robert endlessm com>]

Hi there,

I've not been able to find the code that does it in xdg-app to examine 
how it does it, but I've been wondering about the 
feasibility/possibility of using extensions similar to xdg-app's in 
ostree itself, for managing stuff on the system.

The reason is looking at the process of deploying Endless OS on a wide 
variety of hardware, we might end up needing to ship and support 
multiple kernel versions, but we don't necessarily want to have to 
commingle that with our OS release schedule.

In ARM devices as a co-incidence of uboot having the kernel it looks for 
in a config file kept outside of the OStree, we can feasibly ship two 
kernels in our ostree and select the right one when we build the image 
for the device, because the bootloader integration for ostree is skipped.

However on PC devices the kernel is selected by the ostree root, as it 
should be - but as we get newer kernels/GL/mesa/etc for newer PCs the 
chance of regression on old ones goes up and we need to go back and test 
them. We can hold back certain hardware on certain OS releases but that 
sucks because then they don't get the new shineys.

So a mechanism to put certain systems on a fixed kernel/X/GL version but 
update the rest of the system would be pretty rad - or vice versa - 
parachute new kernel/X/mesa in from the future but not have to upset the 
OS applecart.

So the question is - could you do something similar to xdg-app 
extensions for ostree to make a kinda "hwpack" which could be upgraded 
separately to the OS?

Cheers,
Rob

........................................................................

Robert McQueen  |  +1.415.413.4159  |  Endless <http://endlessm.com/>