ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[Jamie Strandboge <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/25/2013 09:54 AM, Martin Albisetti wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Daniel Holbach
> <daniel.holbach@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> in some conversations I noted that we probably never ruled out click
>> packages as an option for the desktop before having achieved full
>> convergence.
>>
>> I got the feeling that it might make sense to think about this and maybe
>> make the conscious decision to not support this. There are a few reasons
>> which might make this attractive:
>>
>>  - security issues regarding X mitigation
>>  - work supporting click packages in a unity 7 scope
>>  - <more?>
>>
>> What's your take on this? Does anyone have click-packages-on-the-Desktop
>> as a strict requirement? Does anyone feel strongly about supporting this
>> (apart from a testing standpoint for app developers)?
> 
> We don't for Unity7 and we won't make it for 13.10. It's a lot of
> throw-away work that's unscheduled and hard to do.

While I wouldn't use the term 'throwaway' for X mediation, this sentiment is
mostly shared by the security team as well. We have a lot to do for application
confinement and we have to prioritize and X mediation has been quite low on the
list since we get a lot of security benefit from the Mir architecture.

> Since Unity8 will be available in 13.10 as an optional install, that's
> what is being targeted and that's what will give access to Click apps
> to people who want to test them out. There's also too many unknowns to
> ship click packages by default so soon, like filtering by device
> capability, screen sizes, architecture, etc. We don't want to random
> users to find apps that don't work well on their computers and give
> negative feedback to the developers. We'd also have to scale the
> server-side aspects of all of this very quickly, and while we've for
> the most part planned for it, we took a few shortcuts to get us in the
> current state faster knowing that we wouldn't ship to millions of
> users in 2 months  :)
> 
> So I'd suggest we stick with the plan of shipping in Unity8,
> non-default for the brave, and hammer out all the convergence details
> before 14.04.

This sounds very reasonable to me. If Unity8 is all that supports click packages
and Unity8 uses Mir, then users have a reasonable application confinement story.
People who go back to Unity7 (and therefore X) after installing click packages
still don't have display server mediation, but perhaps that is 'ok' for now.


-- 
Jamie Strandboge                 http://www.ubuntu.com/

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