[arch-general] Announcing pacpak

[pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)]

Hello,

On 07/14/2016 12:46 AM, Damjan Georgievski via arch-general wrote:
> Ubuntu is doing something similar it seems
> https://bregmatter.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/x11-applications-and-unity-8/
> 
> This is for their non-deb (deb-less?) distro version, they install
> debs in containers,
> each getting their own XMir server. Good for non-trustworthy or exposed apps.
> 

This is interesting; I did not know about libertine and will take a
closer look at it. libertine’s purpose seems similar to pacpak’s.
However, apparently unlike libertine, most of the work is already done
by Flatpak itself. pacpak will only install using pacman, set up
permissions and manage installed apps.

The current consensus seems to be that Arch will not have any Flatpaks
in its official repositories (neither would I want it to have any).
pacpak will be a tool for the Arch user to bundle regular Arch packages
into Flatpaks when they wish to run them in a sandboxed manner. It is
thus an alternative to Bubblewrap and Firejail that offers more
isolation from the host and its filesystem.

So my roadmap looks like this:
· July: Clean up the code and set up HACKING instructions, a mailing
list and a pacpak’d bugtracker. Incorporate the ideas from this discussion.
· August: Make sure every basic command works and is unit tested (-S,
-R, -Q, -U, -Syu, -Sc).
· September: Make sure the user experience for these is good enough,
e.g. -Syu should not take an hour to complete.

Regards,
Florian Pelz