Re: Fedora/RedHat is moving is a similar direction

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Sergio Tortosa Benedito
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Now, if you want to discuss bundles vs packages, then, you should
> start another thread.

Okay. I am not 100% sure of the differences, so I might do that.

> When I said standalone, I didn't mean that every single application
> must not need anything, there may be times where they may need other
> things (in cases like modular applications or servers), is just a
> simplification of the  bundle concept. How it's done it depends on
> those behind the project and the capabilites of the bundling system.

I was reading a bit more about what they were planning
(https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/Sandbox) and I can't
help but think this is all getting hell-a-complicated. It basically
feels as if they are trying to shoe horn Linux into a design it wasn't
really intended.

Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier just to give each user their own
docker instance and isolate things that way? If a particular app needs
to be isolated, then give it its own user, and allow users access to
it via remote (e.g. Xclient, ssh, etc.)

> Btrfs is a *new* file system (just like EXT4, the one tipically used
> today), which features a lot of promising features (Copy On Write,
> Compression...) one of them being snapshots, which are pretty much
> like backups, with the advantage that btrfs only keeps differences not
> all the files several times. e.g: If I make a snapshot of a folder
> which have two files, then I can ask btrfs to make a snapshot out of
> that folder, so if I modify one file and add another one I can access
> the new folder and thanks to the snapshot the other one as well, the
> main difference from a standard copy is that btrfs will only keep the
> differences (the differences made to the file, and the new file) while
> the a standard copy would just have two copies of everything (ignoring
> if is duplicated or if it is not), you can even modify the snapshots
> just like any other folder. If you are curious I suggest you to search
> info about btrfs.

But what bothers me about it is that it would lock users into Btrfs.
Is that what bothered you about it too? I mean, I get the advantage of
using delta's but the need not depend on a single file system.

> (I don't know much about docker so there's a possibility I'm wrong)
> Based on what I have read they serve the same purpose on a different
> level, images are barebones OSes, and provide a base upon which the
> application runs, runtimes are basically the same: a set of libraries
> provided by someone (GNOME, KDE ...) which include a set of libraries
> which application can base upon them, everything not included by these
> runtimes must be incorporated by the application.

Ah, I see. Basically it is a snapshot of usr/ populated as needed for
a particular app.

>> Oh, what did you think of the way they organized data, config and
>> cache directories all under a single per-application directory?
> Truth be told when I read this I jumped some parts, one of them the
> one telling this, so thank you for making me read that. I think it's a
> very good idea, though I wonder how will they manage having multiple
> versions of the same app with incompatible configs or other things, I
> like the ability to have more than directory (by changing the
> variables), as this gives (in an automatic and transparent way) a way
> of having more than one application profile.

I think they expect the app to deal with config version differences. I
was somewhat concerned that it would be harder to manage, say, a
central `cache` location. Say if the admin wanted all cache to go to a
ram disk, for example.