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[gmathisz]

Is there a possibility to have the software provided as a flatpack or appimage vs exclusively as a deb file?

[Awesome Donkey]

Using Flatpak to distribute MC might actually be useful, especially for those non-Debian OSes that don't use .deb/APT or OSes with out-of-date libraries. Almost all the modern distros support Flatpak out-of-the-box... well, except Ubuntu (at least not without a PPA) because they have their rival Snappy (though honestly, IMO, Flatpak is the better of the two). The obvious benefit here is one MC package could be distributed which would work on every single Linux distro that supports Flatpak... which is nearly all of them. Debian Stretch supports Flatpak, Fedora 23+ supports Flatpak, Linux Mint 18.3+ supports Flatpak, Arch Linux Supports Flatpak, openSUSE supports Flatpak, Solus supports Flatpak, etc. The list goes on and on.

Bob, I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.

https://flatpak.org/
https://flatpak.org/hello-world.html

[bob]

Using Flatpak to distribute MC might actually be useful, especially for those non-Debian OSes that don't use .deb/APT or OSes with out-of-date libraries. Almost all the modern distros support Flatpak out-of-the-box... well, except Ubuntu (at least not without a PPA) because they have their rival Snappy (though honestly, IMO, Flatpak is the better of the two). The obvious benefit here is one MC package could be distributed which would work on every single Linux distro that supports Flatpak... which is nearly all of them. Debian Stretch supports Flatpak, Fedora 23+ supports Flatpak, Linux Mint 18.3+ supports Flatpak, Arch Linux Supports Flatpak, openSUSE supports Flatpak, Solus supports Flatpak, etc. The list goes on and on.

Bob, I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.

https://flatpak.org/
https://flatpak.org/hello-world.html

Just browsed it really quickly looking for issues that might get in the way.

1) I'm not seeing that we can access ALSA directly
2) If we're sandboxed I'm not seeing how we get at media files in a way that's easy and flexible for the user.
3) I'm not sure we'll have control of system things like preventing HDMI from sleeping, ir-keytables, etc...

Any thoughts?

[mwillems]

Just browsed it really quickly looking for issues that might get in the way.

1) I'm not seeing that we can access ALSA directly
2) If we're sandboxed I'm not seeing how we get at media files in a way that's easy and flexible for the user.
3) I'm not sure we'll have control of system things like preventing HDMI from sleeping, ir-keytables, etc...

Any thoughts?

Flatpak would definitely limit access to system resources and you'd need to jump through a lot of hoops (assuming you can even get direct alsa access from a flatpak).  For MC's use case something like appimage is almost certainly a better target as it just bundles the dependencies in a way that can run on any linux system, but doesn't sandbox at all to my knowledge.  Appimage runs anywhere without need for explicit "support" in the distro.  Appimage is an older standard that flatpak is hoping to replace, but my experience has been that appimage is easier from both a developer and end user perspective. Certainly worth a look.