Flatpak 1.2 Likely Coming Around Year's End With New Features

[LinAGKar]

I’m rather shocked that Flatpak developers would want to go to a quarterly releases schedule. In part rapid release are cause many of the issues flatpaks supposedly address. We could easily end up with dozens of incompatible Flatpak releases. Makes no sense really.

Not really, since they would presumably be backwards compatible.

[oiaohm]

I’m rather shocked that Flatpak developers would want to go to a quarterly releases schedule. In part rapid release are cause many of the issues flatpaks supposedly address. We could easily end up with dozens of incompatible Flatpak releases. Makes no sense really.

Sorry I don't get what you are talking about with rapid. Quarterly release schedule is Linux kernel release schedule and this is not rapid release. Rapid release is a like the wine project a release every 2 weeks.

At every 2 weeks wine requires that it packages itself. At some point flatpak application will have to be packaged outside distributions because distributions updates are too slow. Kernel features flatpak needs is not increasing.

I would suspect that flatpak application packaging lands after libcapsule work lands in flatpak. Nvidia driver releases are about every 7 days. I am sorry but a 3 month release cycle is not what you call rapid.

The cure to dozens of incompatible flatpak releases is simple release flatpak directly from the flatpak project without being limited by distribution maintainers. We already know due to endlessos that the runtime that flatpak provides outside namespace provides all the functionality bubblewrap, ostree and flatpak need to function. So flatpak, ostree and bubblewrap parts don't need to be built against individual distribution provided packages now.

[Guest]

Flatpak sucks. Snap has spotify, useful software. FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

Flatpak and Snap both suck. AppImage ftw.

[cybertraveler]

I’m rather shocked that Flatpak developers would want to go to a quarterly releases schedule. In part rapid release are cause many of the issues flatpaks supposedly address. We could easily end up with dozens of incompatible Flatpak releases. Makes no sense really.

The implementation of a quarterly release schedule doesn't imply that their will be breaking changes every quarter. Considering that Flatpak is design to provide a stable and environment for flatpak packaged programs, I'd expect that their wont be breaking changes (or only very rarely). They will probably just fix bugs, add new portals and extend existing features in every release.

[Vistaus]

Flatpak sucks. Snap has spotify, useful software. FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

Flatpak sucks because Snap has Spotify? Flatpak has Spotify too.
https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.spotify.Client
In fact, Flatpak had Spotify long before Snap had.

[Vistaus]

The implementation of a quarterly release schedule doesn't imply that their will be breaking changes every quarter. Considering that Flatpak is design to provide a stable and environment for flatpak packaged programs, I'd expect that their wont be breaking changes (or only very rarely). They will probably just fix bugs, add new portals and extend existing features in every release.

Exactly. And even in the worst-case scenario where they might want to break stuff at some point, they could always introduce an LTS release that will be supported for like a year or so.

[Wilfred]

Have you even used flatpak? flatpak has spotify and pretty much everything snap has. flatpaks have been a much better experience for me even on ubuntu.

Sure, but spotify claims that they do snap. So I used snap to have spotify.

[oiaohm]

Exactly. And even in the worst-case scenario where they might want to break stuff at some point, they could always introduce an LTS release that will be supported for like a year or so.

Wine project stable. New stable every 12 months with updates every 3 months. Why is wine updates on it stable so fast. Please remember nvidia opengl is updating every week and it not the only part updating this fast. This Nvidia example is Windows or Linux no difference..

Welcome to the bugger. You are dealing in graphical the update of the parts you depend on are insanely fast. You need to perform updates ever 3 months unless you start telling people they cannot use X versions of Nvidia graphics and the like so you deal with quirks in those drivers in kind of timely pattern.

Game and application developers want to make a binary that does not change.

If the application and game developers want to be stable and your drivers are updating weekly you need a middle ware.

Windows has the application compatibility toolkit that is a solution to apply shims to non changing binaries to deal with the changing quirks.

Really when you know the field a release every 3 months will most likely be too slow. I can see flatpak dealing with some of these graphics hell in the run-times.

The idea of LTS starts falling apart with the desktop. You graphics drivers are not LTS. Other parts of the desktop are not LTS either.

Lot of people think wine development releases at every 2 weeks is fast. This is half the speed Nvidia is moving at.

[oiaohm]

Sure, but spotify claims that they do snap. So I used snap to have spotify.

And people after they have deployed a lot of snap and had the issue of bad perform get them end up swapping across to flatpak. Flatpak has not been able to use marketing to get packages.

The issue with snap is that bad that it would be useful to have something like alien package converter to convert snap package to flatpak ones.

Just because upstream developers support something does not mean it fact works. Snap is one of those things it broken and I have seen no fix for it problems coming. Its really a matter of time until coverters appear.

Spotify on flatpak is built from the official deb package coveted. Why are ubuntu and debian users not using that package directly that much you find it has dependencies on exact versions of ffmpeg and other things that they did not bundle. Spotify is good example of we make broken then it up to the community to turn provided broken into functional..

[Weasel]

Lot of people think wine development releases at every 2 weeks is fast. This is half the speed Nvidia is moving at.

Why does it even matter how fast official releases are done? It's not like people work or send patches any faster (or slower) just because there's a time-based release.