[Dev] GNOME Software, archlinux-appstream-data, and Flatpak

bill-auger bill-auger at peers.community
Thu May 31 00:46:48 GMT 2018


im not sure exactly what this feature request implies; but third-party package
managers pose a special challenge to the FSDG guidelines - so i suggested this
needs some discussion

as a staring point for discussion i will note this open issue[1] that
exemplifies one extreme end of the spectrum by suggesting that perpahs parabola
should blacklist if not patch all third-party package managers such as pip,
rubygems, npm

assuming this is deemed to be FSDG-compliant, how much work would need to be
done to make this happen? as i remember this would require at the very least
some work creating an appstream data package


On Wed, 2018-05-30 at 19:29 -0400, Christopher Davis wrote:
> GNOME Software uses Flatpak and the system package manager.

this next statement is perhaps nit-picking, but that wording is too pretentious
not to be made clear - i dont imagine the gnome people would agree with it as
worded - until the day comes when gnome releases it's very own distro, then
gnome would have no grounds to define the "system package manager" - in the
context of a distro, the 'gnome software' program and gnome itself are third-
party software - 'flatpack' is yet another unrelated third-party software that
the 'gnome software' program makes use of for it's own purposes, which should be
entirely orthogonal to anything that "the system" is concerned with - in other
words, if this program is capable of installing software without using pacman
and installing it to the same system locations as pacman might install that same
software, then this program should be blacklisted for that reason alone, because
it leads to system instability - i had to mention that because i have seen pip
do this, and it is a real mess to cleanup


[1]: https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/1035
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