I assume it doesn't, but thought I'd ask.

I really like the principles behind both gentoo and flatpak, but right now I can only do the gentoo way or the flatpak way (and I've opted for gentoo's for now).

What I'd love to have from flatpak:

  • container like sandboxing and isolation
  • customizable sandboxing and permissions

What I'd love to have from gentoo:

  • powerful build system building packages from source
  • global declarative management of compilation options
  • easy patches
  • easy to add packages that aren't in repos
  • support for many architectures or setups
  • aurtzy@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    9 months ago

    Does Guix fit your criteria, perhaps? If you haven't heard of it, you can think of it as Nix with a Lisp frontend.

    I unfortunately am not very experienced with containerizing packages so I can't say much, but I know you can do it; the Nonguix channel employs containers for some proprietary software.

    Like Nix, Guix has all that building-from-source stuff you'd want from Gentoo. There's recently been work on making parameterized packages (the Guix equivalent of USE flags) a thing, but it's still work-in-progress.

    Ignoring the steep upfront cost of learning it, I'd say Guix makes it incredibly easy to add your own packages. Here's the custom packages I currently have in my dotfiles repository. I can import one to my main config file, add the package, and it gets included in my environment the next time I reconfigure it.

    As for patches, I can't make any comparisons since I'm not familiar with Gentoo, so I think a code snippet is probably better for you to judge if you'd like it.

    Here's a minimal example: 
    (define-public custom-pkg
  (package
    (inherit pkg)
    (name "custom-pkg")
    (version (package-version pkg))
    (source (origin
              (inherit (package-source pkg))
              (patches
               (list (string-append (dirname (current-filename))
                                    "/fix-some-thing.patch")))))))

    EDIT: Here's the less verbose version, which you can use instead if all you're doing is adding patches.

    (define-public custom-pkg
  (package-with-patches
   pkg
   (list (string-append (dirname (current-filename))
                        "/fix-some-thing.patch"))))

    Not sure if this addresses your concern about multi-architecture support, but the Foreign Architectures section of the manual discusses what you can build to.

    EDIT: So I was curious after posting this because usually the CLI often has much less verbose options (like --with-input for replacing inputs), and I started wondering if there was any procedure that would make this simpler. Turns out there is :) I've included it under the example. Although, I suppose I should have mentioned you could write your own if you really wanted to.

  • kixik@lemmy.ml
    ·
    9 months ago

    How about not changing at all your regular packages,and containerizing what you want, or as much as possible through current profiles, through firejail? And couplet that with MAC protection offered by apparmor (one can actually set firejail to always use apparmor, and then tweak particular apps not to use it if it's too troublesome).

    This way you have your provided distro packages (gentoo or sourcemage if source based distros, it doesn't matter), and have them execute containerized. The only thing is that there are not firejail profiles for every possible piece of SW, but the vanilla list of containers is not small either.

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
      ·
      9 months ago

      Build everything you use and ackage it in flatpak?

      It's not even that hard to build your own gentoo-based runtimes and install stuff on top of that. Fedora does offer that, too, offering fatpaks based on their own fedora based runtime + rpms.