On Fri, 2016-06-17 at 09:59 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 09:11:48PM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> For atomic workstation, this is the goal. We even need that,
> because in
> that setup the OS (/usr) would be a read-only image (based on
> rpms), so
> we could not install new rpms. Instead we'd take our existing rpms
> and
> create flatpaks from them.
How would non-GUI applications be installed in this picture?
I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind for a non-GUI applications,
but options available include.
* Run in a container
This is the obvious path for network services - if you want to run
Mailman or Wordpress on your workstation. It's also may be the
an interesting route for development tools - the container
provides the "SDK" you are developing against.
* Use a layered RPM
rpm-ostree now has support for locally installing RPMs on top of an
OSTree. We don't want to use it as our primary installation
mechaniss, because it causes problems for the idea that applications
are upgraded independently from the OS. But it can be the perfect
escape hatch if you need 'tracepath' or whatever and it isn't
otherwise available.
* Package in a flatpak
There's nothing inherent about Flatpak that prevents it from working
for many TUI and command line tools; the export system would have to
be extended to export a wrapper script to turn 'nano' into
'flatpak run org.nano-editor.Nano'. Turning on sandboxing is harder.
- Owen