On 2023-04-26 03:43, Simon Lees wrote:
On 4/21/23 20:45, Richard Brown wrote:
On 2023-04-20 13:10, Simon Lees wrote:
There we have nice graphical tools for handling the flatpaks, like GNOME Software. No typing anything, just pressing pretty buttons.
Does this also handle rpm's? I am generally unfamiliar with it as an openSUSE user who has access to yast and doesn't use Gnome (other then in lightning talks to show its useability issues :-P) i'm not that familiar with it.
In the MicroOS Desktop we have removed all rpm handling from GNOME Software - This is one of the reasons it runs liked greased lightning now :) However before then, we did a number of experiments, especially around using dnf/microdnf (which has a much more robust packagekit backend) and extending that backend to support Transactional Updates by adding libtukit support. This fell apart though, mostly because libtukit (quite rightly) only provides the generic distribution-neutral functionality to do transactional-updates. Distro specific logic, like handing the openSUSE way of doing kernel updates and bootloader/initrd generation isn't there at all. That meant that it 'worked'..until you had a kernel update and then your system stopped booting. Not exactly the level of reliability we wanted ;) And no one ever got around into introducing like this logic into dnf/microdnf, so we had to drop that effort and I made the call to rip out all the rpm handling entirely
So would it be a better base for a hybrid solution then yast? and would upstream accept contributions? One other thing we found with Grassy Knoll is the dependency stack for anything Gnome related becomes very large very quickly and how / what we get from SUSE is still pretty unclear at this point. Having said that GDM has similar issues and i'd like to solve them there because its significantly better then lightdm in many applications.
Well, despite giving the idea of 'hybrid' graphical package management a chance, in the context of the MicroOS Desktop I actually LOVE where we've ended up. In that OS, we WANT to encourage people to use Flatpaks as a first class citizen for graphical apps. For commandline apps or graphical apps that aren't flatpaks, we have rpms installed using regular ol' zypper inside distroboxes. Messing around with packages in the host OS is really a last resort if the above two don't work, and in that context making people use transactional-update is just fine. If you want my opinion, there is no better solution for a transactional, read-only root Desktop. If people disagree with my world-view though and really want to do something in this area, the best way forward would be resurrecting the dnf/microdnf-libtukit-packagekit integrations and extending them so they're feature complete with transactional-update. -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman