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AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

appimage.org

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Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#171

Post by _hyn3 »

inopinatus wrote: post #167
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have glibc in each app bundle, it won't run everywhere. Different distros have different versions of glibc and it's very easy to end up in a situation where you use some symbol that's not defined in the system one.

This makes a mockery of shared libraries. The technical debt will accrue and run unfathomably deep. Security failures due to currency issues are simply the most obvious. The insoluble mystery bugs of mismatched dependencies will plague application developers that choose this distribution strategy.

Yay for hyperbole ;)

Shared libraries are most useful when matched within a specific distribution's package/version chain.

Tying a third-party distributed package to a given shared library, on the other hand, is less helpful than just supplying the expected, tested, and supported library upfront and still let knowledgeable operators do what they will on their chosen platform.

No technical debt is accrued if the libs are truly interchangeable anyway, but especially if they are not, this stands a better shot at fixing it.

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#174

Post by ugos »

takluyver wrote: post #65
ugos wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, sandboxing is a must-have feature. xdg-app has a system of runtime so it can run on any distro as long as you have installed the runtime needed by the app. Also GNOME and Papyros will have it while KDE seems interested in it also so it should have quite a lot of support.

xdg-app looks good, but I think we're still at least a couple of years away from the point where a developer can use xdg-app to reach the majority of desktop Linux users. That's a long time in software development terms.

You're surely right, but to me the important aspect is not only to make a package that run everywhere but also bring the mobile security scheme to desktop ie have apps that are sandboxed and run on top of a well-defined runtime with well-defined APIs. In that sense Xdg-Apps have a bigger mission that AppImage so maybe we can't really compare them

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#175

Post by bitwize »

revelation wrote: post #100
DanielDent wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux Kernel interface does an excellent job of remaining stable. There's a surprisingly small set of interfaces that the kernel actually exposes to userland, and in the words of Linus, "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!". I don't see the lack of stable APIs elsewhere as an actual problem. The biggest problem is that it makes life harder for proprietary software developers - it's pretty much mandatory for them to setup…

What exactly was achieved in the backwards compatibility nightmare that is Gnome 3, for example? This: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 All things UI in Linux distributions go through so much insane thrashing that very very few application developers want to bother. There are no tangible benefits to UI thrashing; people use systems for software , not window chrome!

This is because the developer community, aside from some long-time system hackers like Linus who know what's at stake (most of whom are Linus's age or older), do not think in terms of building software that will last and adapt to changes. They think in terms of "old and busted" and "new hotness" and that their job is to migrate everyone off the old and busted and force the community to adopt new hotness. Hence the churn in GNOME, hence systemd.

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#176

Post by toyg »

pdonis wrote: post #164
toyg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> preferably with two different managers. That's overcomplicating things. The "user" manager would have to figure out where the specific distribution is storing this or that lib. Doing it reliably across even a small subset of distributions (say, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and RedHat) and a small subset of their releases, would be very challenging. It would make much more sense to add a "user mode" option for the likes o…

> It would make much more sense to add a "user mode" option for the likes of apt-get, whereby it does not need sudo and it will install the specified package in ~/bin, ~/usr etc, symlinking necessary libraries. And then any random piece of malware running in your browser can in principle hose all your applications. There's a very good reason that ordinary users do not have write access to application binaries on Linu…

It would hose only your "usermode" apps, which would be a small subset -- likely smaller unpopular apps that lag in the distro repository. The system as a whole would remain intact, so you can logoff and clean up the mess as root. What hack would rely on some specific app being deployed in user-mode anyway? To do what, steal user files it already has access to?

It's obvious that "usermode" should be the exception and not the norm, but from a security standpoint it's exactly the same as compiling and installing with custom prefixes.

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#177

Post by [deleted] »

toyg wrote: post #176
pdonis wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would make much more sense to add a "user mode" option for the likes of apt-get, whereby it does not need sudo and it will install the specified package in ~/bin, ~/usr etc, symlinking necessary libraries. And then any random piece of malware running in your browser can in principle hose all your applications. There's a very good reason that ordinary users do not have write access to application binaries on Linu…

It would hose only your "usermode" apps, which would be a small subset -- likely smaller unpopular apps that lag in the distro repository. The system as a whole would remain intact, so you can logoff and clean up the mess as root. What hack would rely on some specific app being deployed in user-mode anyway? To do what, steal user files it already has access to? It's obvious that "usermode" should be the exception and…

[deleted]

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#178

Post by toyg »

matzipan wrote: post #158
michaelmrose wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate that people have this idea. It's why people create apps which consist of a built in web server their own copy of chrome that connects to said server. In the end something that ought to have taken 10mb of space and 20mb of ram requires 100mb of space and half a gig of ram and still manages to be slow on a new system at operations that ought to have been fast on a ten year old machine. Down with the Javas…

I've been spending a lot of time in the embedded area lately (sub-200Mhz 32k RAM automotive systems, firmware and fpgas) and I agree with you. But there's always tradeoffs. In this case you're trading some memory (which is cheap nowadays) for up-to-date, secure, usable apps, which seems to be a pretty complex thing to do. Nobody solved it so far. The people using node-webkit are offloading the library compatibility i…

Or in other words, they use a poor man's Java vm, except bigger and more fragile.

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#179

Post by pdonis »

toyg wrote: post #176
pdonis wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would make much more sense to add a "user mode" option for the likes of apt-get, whereby it does not need sudo and it will install the specified package in ~/bin, ~/usr etc, symlinking necessary libraries. And then any random piece of malware running in your browser can in principle hose all your applications. There's a very good reason that ordinary users do not have write access to application binaries on Linu…

It would hose only your "usermode" apps, which would be a small subset -- likely smaller unpopular apps that lag in the distro repository. The system as a whole would remain intact, so you can logoff and clean up the mess as root. What hack would rely on some specific app being deployed in user-mode anyway? To do what, steal user files it already has access to? It's obvious that "usermode" should be the exception and…

> It would hose only your "usermode" apps, which would be a small subset

Until more and more user apps start to get out of sync with the "system" versions of things, and therefore need to be installed with the "user" option in order to work.

> What hack would rely on some specific app being deployed in user-mode anyway?

A hack that doesn't care about specific apps but just wants to compromise whatever it can. Like, you know, a virus.

> To do what, steal user files it already has access to?

And send them to the Internet, without your knowledge. Like viruses already do--only it's a lot harder to get them to run on Linux. At least, it is now.

Re: AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere

#180

Post by michaelmrose »

jhasse wrote: post #162
rythie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone has root on their Linux box and even if you do, you ought to be able to install applications as you without sudo'ing anything. Right now most Linux applications guide you to a deb/rpm which runs as root (and who knows if you can trust it). TBH this is just the start of making applications more secure, they ought to be sandboxed too, so one application can't read the data from another application by defau…

GNOME is working on it: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

You can make it slightly harder to infect the rest of the system leaving the factual truth that the moment you install malware you are hosed unchanged
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