apps on different partitions/media

[Robert McQueen]

Hi all,

We touched on this at the GNOME Software hackfest last week, but 
currently Endless has some of it's (legacy) app bundles installed on 
both the root filesystem, and some on a 2nd drive, usually SD card but 
sometimes

In migrating existing deployed systems to xdg-app we're faced with the 
hair-raising prospect of having to copy/move apps from one drive to the 
other, with all of the disk space bloat or non-atomicity that this 
entails. Often, particularly on the lower-cost devices, we have very 
small amounts of free space on one or both of these drives.

An alternative approach is if xdg-app could support a mode where apps 
were installed in a 3rd (or Nth) place which wasn't simply on the system 
or in the user's home directory. What would it take to add some kind of 
--external mode to xdg-app where it could manage an app repo/deployments 
on another path which wasn't the system one or the user one?

This ideally wouldn't be specific to one user or other - on our devices 
these devices are mounted in fstab with root priveleges. If it's 
simpler, we could limit this so that it would just be apps and not 
runtimes, as we're likely to impose this policy to avoid the same .so 
files being loaded multiple times from disk.

Obviously there is a little detail around these devices potentially 
coming and going, as they are mounted on a separate filesystem, and in 
time it would be great to actually explicitly support this, but in the 
short term we need to at least gracefully degrade to have the 
.desktop/.service files go away when the apps are not present.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Rob

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Robert McQueen  |  +1.415.413.4159  |  Endless <http://endlessm.com/>