Re: All stable flatpak builds moved to flathub

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2017-11-13 at 12:11 +0100, Alexandre Franke wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com
> > wrote:
> > The goal of flathub (https://flathub.org/) is to be a single
> > location
> > where you can find builds of the latest stable version of linux
> > desktop
> > applications, ideally maintained by the upstream author. That way
> > the
> > experience for flatpak users is much nicer, just add one remote and
> > you
> > can then find all apps via e.g. gnome-software.
>
> Such centralisation means a single point of failure. By supporting
> the
> addition of remotes, flatpak seemed to have potential for
> decentralisation. Is some kind of federation or other way to address
> this issue on the roadmap?

Flatpak itself is completely decentralized, in that anyone can (and do)
create repos that anyone can install from. All these are on equal level
in the CLI and in terms of features, and none are installed by default.

However, this leads to a pretty crappy user experience both for users
who have to hunt for trustworthy repos all over the net, and for
developers who each have to play sysadmin and maintain the
infrastructure for a repo.

So, the middle-road we've chosen for flatpak is to have one repo that
has some level of review/testing that has most apps, so that people can
get started easily.

I'm not sure what you mean by "federation", but we don't plan to ever
have one locally defined remote name resolve to a multitude of
independent app sources. We are however working on distributing that
repo, so that you can have e.g. a local, partial mirror, even ones
discovered via avahi. However, each remote name is tied to one GPG key,
so the source of the original builds are always one entity.


-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's an oversexed hunchbacked librarian possessed of the uncanny powers 
of an insect. She's an orphaned blonde queen of the dead in the wrong 
place at the wrong time. They fight crime!