When I set out to create xdg-app I had two goals:
- Make it possible for 3rd parties to create and distribute applications that works on multiple distributions.
- Run applications with as little access as possible to the host. (For example access to the network or the users files.)
Yesterday I released version 0.5.0 of xdg-app, and which I now finally consider feature complete for the first of these goals. It now has tooling that makes it easy to build apps, it has multiple graphical frontends, and it is now pretty robust and featureful.
0.5.0 is already built in Fedora 23, and is available for other distributions here.
No software is ever finished obviously, so I will continue working on xdg-app. However, going forward the majority of my work will now be focusing on the sandboxing and portal aspects of xdg-app.
Please if possible target xenial (dev) instead of vivid (EOL) for Ubuntu PPA.
Thanks!
Bryan
Its very exciting news, I have been following xdg-app development for a while, and have a basic questions:
could xdg-app be considered as a rival to docker or even replace it in future? Here we have same underlying technology, cgroup, namespaces, etc. Docker, rkt, lxc etc are here to 1) allow for portable packaging format for apps (one damn format to run everywhere) 2) sandbox apps and separate it from host. These are both goals of xdg-app!
To my mind it is just ridiculous to have a format for desktop apps and another one with exact same underlying technology for server apps! And where is the boundary between server and desktop? What if I install MySQL/bind9 etc on my desktop?
Also docker style of aggregating all app and dependencies and OS detail in one huge image is not exactly very smart! xdg-app style with runtimes is far smarter, that’s why I wish to see xdg-app on both desktop and server space! One app format for Linux.
//mehdi
Medhi: xdg-app and docker are quite different and do different things well. They share a lot of technologies, but can’t replace each other.