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Hi Chip! Did you evaluate flatpak/appimage/snap before developing XARs? If so, what were the shortcomings that you noticed in them? I have found reasonably go

• ctur 8y ago
  XAR development began in 2014 and hit production use in an early form in 2015; this was before some other options were out there, or before, I believe, AppImage went the squashfuse route. XAR doesn't aim to, say, represent a sandboxed filesystem or provide some isolation or provide a specification for GUI apps to seamlessly integrate with your desktop. Instead, the main idea is to just get a single file that, when run, mounts a filesystem and runs a command inside it. In my mind, at least, it's a simpler, smaller primitive you could build other systems on top of (like we have with deploying Python, Lua, and Node).