With my upstream developer hat and Ubuntu developer for about a decade hat on I really call BS on this. This is very hard in practice. It's hard even when you know things very well just because it is very complex and involves multiple pieces moving across multiple organisations and people.
Snaps, flatpak and appimage really make the aspect of distribution of free software less crazy. It is a hard problem to solve, we will get some things right and some things wrong. We will learn in the process. Eventually the platform may become useful for proprietary software but it will first and foremost improve for FOSS.
If you are on a niche distribution you are missing out 10s of thousands of applications because it is packaged for Debian or Fedora and not for your system. If you are on Debian stable you miss out that important update or that new feature that you won't have for the next months or more. If you are on the packaging side you know how it is like in the trenches.
I really cannot believe anyone who has done packaging or upstream development to not acknowledge those real world issues. Packaging is extremely hard because we all made it so.
Crazy novel idea; The FOSS developer could just give out the source code, maybe with some helper build scripts, and then users could just build the software on whatever platform they want. Maybe making changes to which features they need and which external dependencies they required.
Even crazier; what if we had a standard, well supported build system that we could included with every OS and distro?
Nah, thats crazy talk. Lets repackage an entire OS so you can run an OS while your running your OS so you can listen to internet radio.
> and then users could just build the software on whatever platform they want.
most of my users are non-technical (yes, even on linux). Also, if you want to use a modern development environment this won't work: for instance, I use C++14 / 17 which restricts me to distros at least as recent as ubuntu 18.04 for building and cuts out an immense part of the user base. With AppImage it does not matter what OS my user is running - even if the OS isn't able to build my software, it will be able to run it.
> Even crazier; what if we had a standard, well supported build system that we could included with every OS and distro?
won't happen. I have users on ubuntu 12.04 which still uses e.g. CMake 2.8 which is way too old and a frankly different language than CMake > 3.0. Even if it was another build system it would be the same problem : you would have to restrict yourself to the oldest released version still in used of the build system, which really really sucks because build systems hardly ever "get it right" in their 1.0 version.
It's not a crazy idea, just one that entirely limits the target audience to extremely technical people. Some people would like to make their software available to a wider audience.
