I am not an expert, but my understanding is that technically there is not much wrong with the flatpack format if a project depends on bleeding edge components but wants to run on an older OS, it can contain/download the newer parts it needs without overwriting the original versions on the OS, for example its an LLVM project and because LLVM changes its API regularly its users are tied to specific versions. So a project flatpack can set the version of LLVM it needs, and if that version of LLVM is not available on the target system it will be installed in a sandbox just for that application.
As a consequence of the isolation flatpack can also provide sandboxing of applications so users can be assured that applications cannot do things they do not expect (see for example the recent XZ compression code doing network spying). But neither of those use-cases apply to applications like Geany, it is pretty lenient in its dependencies (plugins maybe less so) and its inherent that an IDE does dangerous things like writing files, and running dangerous code (like stuff I wrote :grin:) so sandboxing will break at least some of its functionality, or of plugins that might need more capabilities, eg network access. So as @eht16 says, flatpacks don't give any technical advantages for Geany. One thing it might do is make newer versions available on long term stable distros. So project created flatpacks might be useful, but the process of creating flatpacks of Geany seems to be complex, or at least previous people who tried have not been able to contribute an appropriately automated build process so far. The Geany project does not have the resources to do it itself or support it or to add any effort to releases, it has to be automated and work correctly and reliably. The real problem is anonymous internet sources of flatpacks, like flathub, or Ubuntu private repositories or ... etc. That has always been the problem for any format when posted online, it happened on Sourceforge decades ago, spyware was added to software there. Sorry I don't have a solution to that or I would retire a billionaire, just be careful. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/geany/geany-themes/issues/47#issuecomment-2094830328 You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Message ID: <geany/geany-themes/issues/47/2094830...@github.com>
