Flatpak for Terminal or Server Applications

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 1:27 AM Katherine Pata <me at katherine.sh> wrote:
>
> After recently distro hopping to try the new shiny things in Fedora, and not having access to all the packages I used to have, I've been thinking about how to handle this issue. Looking into managing my own spec files for rpms doesn't sound like a bad solution, but honestly, if I'm going to put in the effort anyways, I would like to easily share it with everyone else.
>
> Considering there is nothing quite as seamless as the AUR on Fedora (copr's are nice, but discoverability and how well maintained they are is relatively subpar), and I want to avoid snapd due to a lack of control for the user in many aspects, as well as the forced centralization... I've really wanted to look into Flatpak packaging. For things like helm, terraform, i3blocks, etc, I would love to be able to package them and share them across people using different distributions.
>
> However, after looking into it, my impression is that Flatpak seems to be very very heavily focused on GUI applications, to the point of making assumptions about there being a graphical environment running. The FAQ, as well as a bunch of posts, have given me this impression. Are there any plans on perhaps supporting terminal applications (e.g. grep, ssh, terraform, helm, etc), system/daemon/desktop environment packages (e.g. sshd, dunst, i3blocks, i3wm), or server software (nginx, memcached, openldap)? (the examples are arbitrary) Perhaps this is already possible, just not well advertised?
>
> I would love to receive more information on this, as I would be really interested in maintaining some packages for software that I personally use.

You're right that the focus of flatpak is on GUI applications. All the
system integration flatpak has is to make this usecase work well. This
doesn't mean that flatpak cannot do other things, like CLI apps or
even server apps. However, its never going to be a great experience
for those. In particular, it will never have the kind of server-side
integration that server-focused systems like podman/docker (or even
kubernetes) have. Additionally, flatpak never runs with raised (root
or similar) permissions as well as some basic sandboxing which makes
certain things impossible.

So, commandline apps in flatpak work fine but are perhaps not
super-ergonomic (it depends on the details). For server apps, you may
be able to get some to work, but I would recommend something else. I
would recommend taking a look at podman/buildah.

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 Alexander Larsson                                Red Hat, Inc
       alexl at redhat.com         alexander.larsson at gmail.com