Cloudron and AppImage / FlatPak

[LoudLemur]

https://appimage.org
https://flatpak.org

Has Cloudron introduced itself to the AppImage and FlatPak projects? They might be interested to hear about Cloudron and even have people willing to help us. Similarly, one could ask the same about Cloudron and Docker, but surely that has already happened...

[necrevistonnezr]

@loudlemur Searching this forum for "appimage" or "flatpak" and finding no topic (except for your question) should give you a first indication.

[girish]

We have not reached out to those projects, no. I guess there are also other related projects like snapcraft. Are you thinking about if we should standardize Cloudron "format" or some such idea?

[LoudLemur]

@girish Standardization could be one sort of benefit. Also, the people motivated to package Free applications like they do for AppImage might be keen to help with packaging Free Software for Cloudron, too. I think there is a good chance that many of them have not heard of Cloudron and would be excited to discover this project.

We should consider sending a Cloudron Ambassador.

[jadudm]

Flatpack and Appimage formats do not provide the kind of process and filesystem isolation that Docker does. I would not be comfortable running run a service like Cloudron if it allowed running things other than well-defined/managed containers.

Yes, there are ways to break isolation and escalate out of a Docker container, but flatpack apps can, essentially, write anywhere on my system. Updating the ecosystem is also much more difficult; by comparison, it is possible to auto-build Docker containers from source and track recent updates/manage timely security vulns in a way that flatpack/appimage packages do not/rarely do.