Permission to add to Flathub

[Justinzobel]

I'd like to publish clustershell to Flathub. I've already created a manifest to upload. To do so, I just need approval from the developers. If you are not happy with some third party uploading, I am happy to send the manifest for you to publish/maintain.

[degremont]

Hi Justin! Thanks for offering publishing ClusterShell to Flathub. Usually, Flathub is used to distribute large and complex projects (ie: browser, or GUI).

I'm curious to know what would be your use case?

[Justinzobel]

Immutable distros.

[martinetd]

How is that more practical than e.g. virtualenv?

(uv is great for this, you don't even need to setup a virtualenv yourself anymore nowadays:

[root@035aaae3fdbd /]# uv run --with clustershell nodeset -ll
@adm example0
@all example[4-6,32-159]
@compute example[32-159]
@gpu example[156-159]
@io example[4-6]
@mds example6
@oss example[4-5]

)

I'm also curious how you'd manage your groups and other clustershell config, with uv you can use /etc/clustershell or $HOME/.local/etc/clustershell as usual with no problem but with flatpak iirc you'd have to find the .local flatpak subdir and deal with it? or do you share your home? I guess you'd need to share the home to access your client ssh key (and possibly ssh agent socket too?) anyway?

Even if we just give permission I'd love to see what kind of config you have prepared first.

[Justinzobel]

I've been pretty busy and haven't had time to come back to this. I guess I'm a very simple user in that I don't use groups or configs. I just specify everything on the command line like so: flatpak --share=network run --filesystem=~/.ssh:ro com.github.ceahpc.clustershell -w $host 'some commands here'.

It suits my local usage, and I will alias it in future to clush or something similar to save me digging through my fish history.

However, yes, local directories are easy to give access to in the flatpak environment, especially if they're clustershell specific e.g. ~/.local/etc/clustershell.

[martinetd]

I'm still somewhat negative on this because if you disappear in a year or two we'll be left with an outdated package there that no-one can update (or retire), and I still don't really see the benefit here where the python ecosystem already provides (too many!) tools to run this in a separate environment.

Do you need the isolation provided by flatpak? If you trust us as much as the next python project, I really think uv is simpler for everyone (see my example with uv tool in the previous reply, I'm starting to use uv everywhere I can and am really happy with it)
If you do need isolation, perhaps something like bwrap or toolbox would also work easily without the need to maintain a such a "package"?

Sorry for being picky here, if you can convince us that it is useful/some people will use it I think we can still be convinced to accept a clustershell flatpak, but I'm not sure any of the current devs see the benefit right now.

[Justinzobel]

I am fully invested in Flatpak. I have on app from another developer there already. Plus, I am one of the core maintainers of all the KDE applications on Flathub. If I should suddenly vanish, the Flathub team are very responsive to developers removing or transferring ownership of access where the original maintainer is unresponsive. I would also be more than happy to give access to anyone on the custershell team right at the start.

I don't need isolation, I just prefer the Flatpak method of application (including CLI) distribution.

If you chose to not approve it on Flathub, I'll likely just host it on my own infrastructure anyway, at least for my own use. Flathub just requires you reach out to developers for approval.