Xdg-App Announced For Desktop App Sandboxing

[gens]

Have you ever actually been developing any Windows software? It's reasonably simple to support XP-Win8.1. You typically ship libraries you depend on and msvcrt versions are supported so long it's not even funny

not for many years now, no
but i have read GLFW and SDL sources a bit
there are some funny ifdefs
and i read a good part of the win8 store apps programming thing, that is stupid

kudos to them for maintaining backwards compatibility for such a long time (ignoring the few bugs that happen)

then again, X and POSIX are maintaining backwards compatibility for a way longer time
so it comes down mostly to the GUI toolkits dropping things every once in a while
why not just make one good toolkit from scratch ?
maybe take the firefox one ?
idk and don't care, just packing it with the binary is way easier then counting on toolkit devs and distro maintainers to get their shit togeter

[nanonyme]

not for many years now, no
but i have read GLFW and SDL sources a bit
there are some funny ifdefs
and i read a good part of the win8 store apps programming thing, that is stupid

kudos to them for maintaining backwards compatibility for such a long time (ignoring the few bugs that happen)

then again, X and POSIX are maintaining backwards compatibility for a way longer time
so it comes down mostly to the GUI toolkits dropping things every once in a while
why not just make one good toolkit from scratch ?
maybe take the firefox one ?
idk and don't care, just packing it with the binary is way easier then counting on toolkit devs and distro maintainers to get their shit togeter

Win8 store is a joke, don't even bother thinking about it. Microsoft took back the idea that you can only sell Metro apps there, based on various articles native apps in Windows store will be a thing starting from next Windows so you can have identical program on Windows store that would run on XP obtainable through a web site

[gens]

Win8 store is a joke, don't even bother thinking about it. Microsoft took back the idea that you can only sell Metro apps there, based on various articles native apps in Windows store will be a thing starting from next Windows so you can have identical program on Windows store that would run on XP obtainable through a web site

well i understand them
they seen apple, valve and android/google make tons and tons of money doing nothing, and they want a piece
i suspect thats also the reason behind making win10 practically free

[TheBlackCat]

wow, you never made a package

basically you just make a script and thats it
if you think making a Docker image is a better idea, its not (and there are distros that do such things)

I have made hundreds of packages. "Make a script" is not always so easy.

[cantpostanon]

Hey you only have to release a source tarball and then hope that some CS students with too much free time will play package maintainer for you and package it for all the different distributions and fix all the distro specific problems. The users of your software might be locked out from the latest version, because of some random ass distro release cycles, but hey it's a great system that totally scales! /s

So true.

[gens]

I have made hundreds of packages. "Make a script" is not always so easy.

harder then testing if your packed image works on other distros ?
harder then packaging that image ?
harder then what you propose, i guess ?
and how exactly is it harder ?

as i said, there are distros that package every program with all its dependecies
they are often criticized and not really popular

and making whatever program work on all distros is not hard at all
and distros do have versions, where few people actually use the bleeding edge one
stuffing things into containers just cuz it sounds better is a Bad Thing

edit:
note that the libraries that are often responsible for this version breakage are the toolkits and some crappy things like boost (ye i compiled a lot of shit)
the only sane solution for a software dev is to avoid the latest and the "greatest"

[TheBlackCat]

harder then testing if your packed image works on other distros ?
harder then packaging that image ?
harder then what you propose, i guess ?
and how exactly is it harder ?

The whole point of deploying images is that if they work on one distro, they will work on any distro that complies with the spec. So yes, that is inherently easier since you don't need to code for or test against every distro you want to support.

and making whatever program work on all distros is not hard at all

That is why it is so common for software binaries to support all distros out-of-the-box. Oh wait, it isn't common at all.

stuffing things into containers just cuz it sounds better is a Bad Thing

Yes, of course there couldn't actually be reasons other than "it sounds better". I am sure Linus knows absolutely nothing about how the Linux software ecosystem works.

I know that this may seem strange to you, but nobody everybody likes having to always reinvent the wheel from scratch every time they want to do some common, everyday task. Your continued insistence that anything other than "write your own implementation from scratch" is a Bad Thing is baffling.

[justmy2cents]

where the fuck did this bullshit originate
who the fuck thinks that it is even remotely hard to target multiple linux distributions

not hard for me, seems not hard for you... but, do imagine. some developers who don't even know what linux distro means or god forbid how to target all of them. if someone only coded for Windows whole life, getting on with Linux might be real problem.

just look all the stupid arguments that are made when someone posts "i'm a n00b, which Linux should i try?". not only that 99% of posters providing answers (sometimes even ranging up to Gentoo and LFS) didn't realize the "i'm a n00b", they also tend to create some religious answers where that poor n00b poster thinks that distros are completely different.

i've got quite a few friends of mine who would love to target linux, but they simply don't have time to wrap up the details like how to compile and target everything. day simply is not long enough due to their other tasks. xdg-app would be a blessing for people like this

[pal666]

libraries, you have to pack with your program anyway

what opengl driver library will you pack with your program?

[Thaodan]

If it's so easy then what's the point of the steam-runtime? And why are there a dozen of distribution specific packages for applications like skype? It's quite obvious to me that the current situation is far from ideal and the Gnome devs seem to agree.

Skype only requires this deos which are the same on any system: xdg-utils hicolor-icon-theme lib32-libpulse lib32-qt4 lib32-libxss lib32-libxv lib32-libxcursor lib32-v4l-utils

Steamruntime trys to support XX different apps, the problem is rock stable vs stable eg. rolling release.