4 ms·

Most packaging for software was done by the distro and not the actual software authors though right?

• nickelpro 5y ago
  Yes, packaging has always been a distro issue never an upstream issue. At the extreme end of this you can look at Arch's saga with Visual Studio Code, since the Arch packagers want to disentangle the .asar app from the specific Electron version it ships inside of (they view Electron as a system library).
  • pabs3 5y ago
    Chromium (and thus Electron, although they deliberately lag behind Chromium) has very frequent security updates. While clearly not all of those affect Electron, and not all of those affect every Electron app, some of them will affect Electron and some will affect some Electron apps. While some Electron apps will follow the (deliberately lagging) Electron security update cycle, most developers probably do not update their app for every Electron security update. So it makes sense for distros like Arch to want to ship the security supported Electron version and have every Electron app use that, but maybe all the changes in Electron are breaking apps that use it, so maybe it makes sense to ship one Electron version per Electron app, but then you get an unknown amount of security issues with each app, depending on how out of date the app's Electron version is. So the choice is between a working app with an unknown amount of security issues, or a regularly broken app with fewer security issues. Neither seem like great options to me. Perhaps Electron needs an LTS version to solve this issue.