On Sat, 22 Jul 2017 at 12:28:04 +0200, Steffen Möller wrote: > And quite some packages in our > distribution do not really need to be installed as root if they were > installed where the user has write permissions. There would hence be > little overhead over what we have now. Should we not somehow find ways > to tag any such location-agnostic packages and prepare dpkg for > installing e.g. in $HOME/.debian when it is executed as non-root?
Rather than inventing a new wheel and having another Debian-specific thing that can only be used on Debian (and not even on derivatives without it being a "Frankendebian" system), might it be better to use Debian's source, binaries or a mixture of the two as input to creating something cross-distribution like Flatpak, AppImage or Snap? I would personally recommend Flatpak. A Flatpak runtime (the library/platform layer shared by multiple Flatpak apps) is basically just a copy of /usr after applying the /usr merge (as in usrmerge or debootstrap --merged-usr). The reference runtimes produced by Flatpak upstream consist of a Yocto base system with flatpak-builder build scripts (flatpak-builder is a bit like Flatpak's equivalent of debhelper) layering useful libraries above it; but there is nothing to stop a distribution from building their own runtimes from dpkg or RPM packages without using flatpak-builder, and I believe Fedora and Endless are already doing this. Debian could too. A Flatpak app (the user-facing part) is basically the app and any bundled libraries that are needed in addition to what's in the runtime, all built with --prefix=/app. Again, the apps produced by upstreams like GNOME and KDE are typically built from source with flatpak-builder, but that is not required. I believe Fedora are already building their leaf packages into Flatpak apps using their normal RPM spec files (which are mostly position-independent), by overriding the prefix used for their standard macros to /app. Relocatable packages like the ones you describe are trivial to convert into a Flatpak app (just move the files around, like I did for rxvt in http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2016/xdg-app/ - xdg-app is the old name for Flatpak). Non-relocatable packages (those that hard-code paths) need rebuilding from source, but I have some ideas about using dh-exec to parameterize the packaging (a bit like the way it works in RPM spec files, but simpler) so that can be done automatically. If this interests you, there are two talks at Debconf that you could attend or stream, both on Monday: one by Cosimo Cecchi of Endless, covering both OSTree and Flatpak, and one by me, focusing on Flatpak. I'm hoping to have a proof-of-concept Debian runtime and a couple of apps that use it (probably games) ready by the time I give my talk. S
