apps on different partitions/media

[Robert McQueen]

On 11/04/16 12:32, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Its kind of a hack, but could you not just patch in symlinks in the
> right place in the xdg-app system repo.
>
> So, for instance:
>
> mkdir -p /var/lib/xdg-app/app/com.endlessm.OldApp/x86_64/master/
> ln -s /old/install/dir /var/lib/xdg-app/app/com.endlessm.OldApp/x86_64/master/old-version
> ln -s old-version active
>
> You have to add a metadata file to the app too.
>
> I think xdg-app would pick this up as an installed app fine, and if you set up the right
> config in the system repo it may even update it correctly.

If I understand correctly, this would make xdg-app think that this app 
was installed, but it wouldn't really be deployed from the ostree? This 
means that when you did an update, it would essentially download the app 
all over again and deploy it "over" the other one?

I was thinking more like having a separate ostree repo on the external 
device and having all of the off-system apps belong to that repo, very 
much like a --user repo.

As we're also moving from 32-bit to 64-bit, changing prefix, and not 
necessarily shipping the same versions, etc, some stuff will be 
different in our post xdg-app migration bundles - but a lot such as 
large data files and assets etc will be shared.

We'd therefore like these apps to belong to an ostree repo on the device 
they're currently stored on, so we can use ostree to help us do the 
migration - basically checking in the legacy apps in as transient 
branches in order to minimise download sizes, then downloading and 
deploying the actual 64-bit xdg-app-ified apps from the server, hoping 
any large data files will already exist and simply be hardlinked, and 
then tidying up the old legacy locations, branches and pruning the ostree.

Thanks,
Rob

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