Can I ignore flatpak indefinitely?
Can I ignore flatpak indefinitely?
I'm admittedly yelling at cloud a bit here, but I like package managers just fine. I don't want to have to have a plurality of software management tools. However, I also don't want to be caught off guard in the future if applications I rely on begin releasing exclusively with flatpak.
I don't develop distributed applications, but Im not understanding how it simplifies dependency management. Isn't it just shifting the work into the app bundle? Stuff still has to be updated or replaced all the time, right?
Don't maintainers have to release new bundles if they contain dependencies with vulnerabilities?
Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?
Also, how is it so much better than images for your applications on Docker Hub?
Never say never, I guess, but nothing about flatpak really appeals to my instincts. I really just want to know if it's something I should adopt, or if I can continue to blissfully ignore.
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Downsides of distro pacakges:
- someone needs to package an application for each distro
- applications often need to maintain support for multiple versions of some of their dependencies to be able to continue to work on multiple distros
- users of different distros use different versions of the application, creating more support work for upstream
- users of some distros can't use the application at all because there is no package
- adding 3rd party package repos is dangerous; every package effectively gets root access, and in many cases every repo has the ability to replace any distro-provided package by including one with a higher version number. 3rd party repos bring the possibility of breaking your system through malice or incompetence.
Downsides of flatpak:
- application maintainers are responsible for shipping and updating their dependencies, and may be less competent at doing timely security updates than distro security teams
- more disk space is used by applications potentially bringing their own copies of the same dependencies
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Many of the problems with security and disk space are limited by flatpaks using same base layer for applications that is shared and easy to update.
Another downside of flatpak is that I don't trust upstream devs to have my best interests at heart, but I trust Debian developers far more. I've seen upstream do some annoying or stupid shit and the Debian maintainers not budging.
I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out. I've seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it. There were many dodgy copyright and licensing problems upstream devs gave no shit about. Debian not including these often eventually put pressure on them to fix this shit or for some replacement to get developed.
I trust Debian developers far more
i definitely agree with you here :)
I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out.
I found the notion of free software implementing PDF DRM rather hilarious, so I had to know more. First I found this help page which confirms that evince does have code which implements PDF restrictions, but it says that its
override_restrictionsoption is enabled by default.But I wondered: when did this get implemented? and was it ever enabled by default? So, I went digging, and here are the answers:
- in May 2005, the restrictions were implemented in evince in this commit
- in September 2005, the
override_restrictionsoption was added in this commit, after discussion in bug #305818 - in December 2006 bug #382700 was opened, requesting that
override_restrictionsbe enabled by default - in January 2008, the default changed in this commit - but only after someone pointed out that the PDF spec does not in fact require the restrictions to be enforced. (The spec says "It is up to the implementors of PDF consumer applications to respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access") đ
I don't see any indication that Debian patched this out during the time when evince had it enabled by default, but I'm sure they would have eventually if GNOME hadn't come to their senses :)
Iâve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it.
In my opinion both sides of the DebianâMozilla trademark dispute were actually pretty reasonable and certainly grounded in good intentions. Fortunately they resolved it eventually, with Mozilla relaxing their restrictions in 2016 (while still reserving the right to enforce their trademark against derivatives which make modifications they find unreasonable):
Mozilla recognizes that patches applied to Iceweasel/Firefox don't impact the quality of the product.
Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.
More generally, Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.
In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.
https://lwn.net/Articles/335415/
The evince PDF reader ran into this issue back in 2005. It is now rare to find a distributor shipping a version of evince which implements copy restrictions. Xpdf implements copy restrictions unconditionally, but Debian patched that code out in 2002, and that patch has spread to other distributors as well. In general, as one would expect, free PDF readers tend not to implement this behavior. Okular is about the only exception that your editor can find; it's interesting to note that the version of Okular shipped with Fedora Rawhide also implements copy restrictions by default. Perhaps this behavior is result of the relative newness of this application; as it accumulates more users, the pressure for more user-friendly behavior is likely to grow.
I see, here is where Debian patched it out of Xpdf in 2002.
Also lmao @ the fact that Okular's
ObeyDRMoption still defaults to true today đ(Including in Debian, as their KDE maintainer declined to carry a patch to change it.)
Another upside is the easy permission management.
You can revoke network access from your password manager to reduce attack surface; you can revoke camera access from your chat app to prevent accidentaly enabling it; You can restrict an app's file system access to prevent unwanted changes; etc.
It's not yet fit to protect from malicious apps, but it still finds some use.
Itâs not yet fit to protect from malicious apps, but it still finds some use.
That it is "not yet fit to protect from malicious apps" is an important point which I think many people are not aware of.
This makes sandboxing something of a mixed bag; it is nice that it protects against some types of incompetent packages, and adds another barrier which attackers exploiting vulnerabilities might need to bypass, but on the other hand it creates a dangerous false sense of security today because, despite the fact that it is still relatively easy to circumvent, it it makes people feel safer (and thus more likely to) than they would be otherwise when installing possibly-malicious apps packaged by random people.
I think (and hope) it is much harder to get a malicious program included in most major distros' main package repos than it is to break out of bubblewrap given the permissions of an average package of flathub.
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