On 22/7/19 10:26 pm, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
Hi Guys, I think I might be a bit tardy to the party here, but the way
you describe flatpack is equivalent to the portable apps on windows is
my understanding correct?
It seems that way, with an element of sandboxing to try and protect the
user who is using these packages. The Debian/Ubuntu package describes
it thus:
Flatpak installs, manages and runs sandboxed desktop application bundles.
Application bundles run partially isolated from the wider system, using
containerization techniques such as namespaces to prevent direct access
to system resources. Resources from outside the sandbox can be accessed
via "portal" services, which are responsible for access control; for
example, the Documents portal displays an "Open" dialog outside the
sandbox, then allows the application to access only the selected file.
.
Each application uses a specified "runtime", or set of libraries, which is
available as /usr inside its sandbox. This can be used to run application
bundles with multiple, potentially incompatible sets of dependencies
within
the same desktop environment.
.
This package contains the services and executables needed to install and
launch sandboxed applications, and the portal services needed to provide
limited access to resources outside the sandbox.
There's also more about it here:
http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html
The downside (from the HPC point of view) is that these binaries will
need to be compiled for a relatively low common denominator of
architecture (or with a compiler that can do optimisations selected at
runtime depending on the architecture).
All the best,
Chris
--
Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Berkeley, CA, USA
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