flatpak-external-data-checker VS flathub

> 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 But there's also a risk in running outdated software.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.

> Nobody ever even audits the binary contents of flatpaks on flathub (were they actually built from the source? the author attests so!).

IME/IIRC There aren't (or shouldn't be) any binary contents on Flathub that are submitted by the author, at least for projects with source available? You're supposed to submit a short, plain-text recipe instead, which then gets automatically built from source outside the control of the author.

> The Flathub service then uses the manifest from your repository to continuously build and distribute your application on every commit.

https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/submission/#ho...

Usually the recipes should just list the appropriate URLs to get the source code, or, for proprietary applications, the official .DEBs. Kinda like AUR, but JSON/YAML. Easy to audit if you want:

https://github.com/orgs/flathub/repositories

I also don't believe third parties maintainers packaging software on flathub is a big issue but I'm also not familiar with how other distro repos trust their maintainers. Hopefully more developers maintain their flatpak themselves (or someone they trust) and get their apps verified. If most apps are verified, warning users of unverified apps might be a good idea.

There's ongoing discussion about splitting open source and proprietary apps in to seperate repos [1]. Additionally having seperate repos for verified and unverified apps might make it more obvious where an app comes from in the cli.

But I don't know how seamlessly an app could transition between being in the third party repo and being in the official repo. Having the user quietly stop receiving updates seems like a bad idea, but automatically migrating might not be desirable either.

I also think flatpaks cli interface needs some work. It is functional but far from distro package managers.

Being verified is especially important for critical apps. Recently someone added malicious versions of apps to the snap store [3]. This lead to people getting their cryptocurrency stolen.

[1] https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/691

[2] https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/requirements

[3] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/temporary-suspension-of-automat...

That means Linux users can now install Bforartists on any Linux distro easily, regardless of glibc version! https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/4295

Still having some problems with the flathub build, see https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/4082 for the current status.

Here is the flathub draft pull request: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/4082

i assume you dont know how flathub works , theirs little or no QC , done flathub is just get told theirs an update for the package , if yo go look at the github repo pes https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/4164 for example , only updates the link to the girt repo , theirs 0 code checked

It all should be written in pages for contributors, read the docs for fusion, and the docs for flathub.

These are criticisms of the flatpak ecosystem as it stands today. Currently, the Firefox ESR package on flathub seems to be caught in limbo or maybe dead. Mozilla publishes both a snap and a flatpak of Firefox latest, but only a snap of the ESR version. This raises the question of why. Have Mozilla chosen to invest more in snaps than in flatpaks? If so, what's their reasoning? (More users on snaps, making it similar to why they put more investment into Windows than Linux? Something else?) If they haven't invested more into snaps than flatpaks, is this a sign that it's harder to maintain flatpaks (or at least on flathub) than snaps? If that's true, I would hope that flatpak/flathub would be soliciting feedback from Mozilla about it.

Because that may be very hard to sandbox: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/3366