Flatpak: Standalone apps for Linux
The problem with all of these app bundle systems is that you end up with 500 MB - 2 GB binaries for every app.  Because dependencies in OSS are generally quite coarsed grained, you end up pulling in almost the entire user space of an operating system into your app.<p>Disk space, memory space (process size and lack of page sharing), and the size of app updates are all an issue (you don&#x27;t want gigabytes of app updates every night).<p>Moreover, there is no standard format for dependencies -- that is completely distro dependent, or you have to grovel through the README of every project and hand-tune it (boiling the ocean).<p>Does Flatpak address this problem at all?<p>A couple years ago I was trying to write a system that addressed this.  You basically use content addressed storage and chroots in the fashion of Plan 9 namespaces.  And you can also use differential compression for slim network updates.<p>But I ran into the problem of boiling the ocean... I wrote like 2000-4000 lines of shell scripts just to build one kind of app (involving R, which involves Fortran...).  I had to duplicate all the work of groveling through the dependencies, which is more difficult than you&#x27;d think for any non-trivial application.  Debian dependency metadata is full of surprised like virtual packages and all that.  The algorithm is to enumerate them is not straightforward and generates huge app bundles.  Also many projects have non-trivial build time config options and downstream patches.<p>Is anyone else working on an app bundle system that solves the problems of disk space, memory size, and update size, as well as versioned dependency specification and resolution?<p>To me Docker seems to punt most of the problem on to the user, and then everybody ends up with OS-sized applications because they can&#x27;t be bothered to trim dependencies.  This isn&#x27;t good for many reasons, but it&#x27;s particularly bad for security.  Then you have to pile hacks upon hacks and try to scan containers for vulnerabilities that you shouldn&#x27;t have put there in the first place.<p>EDIT: I haven&#x27;t looked in more detail, but it seems like Flatpak creates an artifical separation between &quot;runtimes&quot; and &quot;bundles&quot;.  Maybe that is a little hack that will work in practice -- my suspicion is that this will simply recapitulate the dependency versioning problem at a more coarse grained level.  The natural tendency is for the runtimes to become bloated and thus require frequent updates.