flatpak-external-data-checker VS distrobox

> Maybe. The CI rules should be made public in that case, though, surely? Maybe they are?

Agreed, but thankfully they are. The PRs link to <https://github.com/flathub/flatpak-external-data-checker>. That said, it'd be clearer if the flathubbot 'user' profile also linked to that URL.

> The enormous amount of value the distros bring [...] is audit of packages (and packaging).

Yes, auditing against supply chain attacks is good! But there's also a risk in running outdated software. I don't have easy answers. But if automation leaves more time for the hard part, great.

Flathub provides an excellent tool to keep your dependencies up to date, so it's just a matter of adding it to the manifests. Besides, who says 'dependencies not being updated enough' is a valid metric to determine the quality of a package? LOL.

According to Github issue/PR #126 new builds are failing because of a bug in flatpak-external-data-checker or some incompatibility between the two projects at least.

I'm surprised the documentation says that since Flathub itself runs its CLI scripts via Flatpak: https://github.com/flathub/flatpak-external-data-checker

Another thing you could add would be to tag your releases on GitHub, add a tag field next to the commit one, and add an x-checker-data section to the manifest so the Flathub bot will automatically open PRs to update the Flatpak release when you update your repository.

See f-e-d-c, and if you're not planing to submit to Flathub, then look at the GitHub workflow example there. Be aware that auto-merging is not acceptable for anything other than extra-data sources.

Unfortunately the maintainership of the Zoom Flatpak on Flathub has been a bit slow, but you can still install it since the Flathub bot do automatic builds whenever there's an update, thanks to the provided flatpak-external-data-checker service.

There is https://github.com/flathub/flatpak-external-data-checker which automatizes the update pull requests including dependencies. Flatpak has other downsides, but security or not getting the latest and greatest is not one of them.

That seems more like Distrobox to me(?) https://distrobox.it/

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39