Question about runtimes

[Emmanuele Bassi]

> No, I mean if I install a calculator that uses the GNOME runtime, why not
just bring in the parts of the runtime that the calculator needs?

Because that's not how Flatpak works.

Flatpak sets up a complete environment for an application. Any application
developer can either decide to bundle *all* its dependencies in its own
build, and then maintain them; or they can defer to "run times", which
provide and maintain a more complete environment, at the cost of a bigger
size.

What you described is just another package manager, which is precisely what
Flatpak is trying to avoid.

> If I install another program that shares that same runtime, then it could
bring it what it needs on an as-need basis.

If you install another application that shares the exact same run time,
then Flatpak won't have to download the run time again: it'll just download
the new application.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

On Tue, 6 Aug 2024 at 09:35, Mark Naughton <mark at marknaughton.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 05, 2024 at 09:55:20AM GMT, Daniel Wilkins wrote:
> > If flatpaks listed their actual dependencies, every flatpak
> > might require a different version of a ton of libraries, causing a lot
> > of duplication. The idea of runtimes is that they should (hopefully)
> > release relatively rarely and so between all of your flatpaks you
> > should hopefully just have one or two gnome runtimes, one or two kde
> > runtimes.
>
> No, I mean if I install a calculator that uses the GNOME runtime, why
> not just bring in the parts of the runtime that the calculator needs? On
> my system it seemed to bring in 700mb of unneeded dependencies. If I
> install another program that shares that same runtime, then it could
> bring it what it needs on an as-need basis.
>


-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/flatpak/attachments/20240806/4fe6a5c3/attachment.htm>