It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. While I’ve had some personal success just nothing worth posting.

First post of 2024

In the last few days I’ve been wandering around the idea of best practices and economy when it comes to packaging and deploying apps in my company’s ecosystem. It has resurected thoughts about containers and VMs. I’ve also started thinking about modern NAS devices running Synology, TrueNAS, Unraid or just going full bare bones. I’ve also completed a new project that needed some packaging and deployment.

• I wrote the program/service.
• I tested it on my personal computer
• my computer and the DEV machine are different OSs
• I tested it in DEV with a convoluted build process
• The deploy process was written by someone else.
• I have no influence over the deploy in UAT or PRD as I do not have access.

And so I started thinking about flatpak and snap packaging. I’m not sure what they say about executable formats, however, in order for this to work I would need on-prem repositories. And that’s where it falls apart. Snap has something called a leaf store but you still have to put artifacts in the snap store. Which sort of defeats the purpose.

As for flatpak I found some doc “Hosting a repository”. As I skimmed the doc I just decided flat out that this was not for me.

I’ve reminded myself that I have my preferences for operating systems. I prefer OpenBSD, full stop. I do not need every shiney new toy and I certainly do not trust all those freshly minted programmers. It’s the reason I do not trust Linux anymore but when I have to… I like ClearLinux (from Intel) and right now I’m using pop_os.

I suppose I could start supporting native packages. They are all pretty simple but that’s a story for another day.