Long term support of a package

1

Hi,

We distribute Bitwig Studio on flathub, and when a customer buys Bitwig Studio, he owns a given version for life.

On top of publishing to flathub, we would also have an archive directory on our website so a user can download any older version from us as a .flatpak package.

If I understood correctly, after 2 years a runtime is not maintained anymore.

I totally understand that at some point in time a runtime is not maintained anymore, this is fine.

We want to be sure that if we produce com.bitwig.BitwigStudio-4.1.5.flatpak today, it will still be installable in 5 years. And for that we wonder if old and unmaintained runtime are still available? If the user installs the package, will he get a warning “You’re about to install an unsupported runtime”? Or will the installation fail saying “Your package depends upon a runtime which isn’t available”?

Another options for us could be: flatpak install ./com.bitwig.BitwigStudio-4.1.5.flatpak --force-runtime=XXX. This may work as there is a chance that a newer runtime is backward compatible and Bitwig Studio itself has a small surface of dependencies toward the runtime.

What is in your opinion the best way to deal with long term support of a package?

Thank you for your help.

Regards,
Alexandre

4 Likes
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Freedesktop SDK has a 2 years support which mean 21.08 is support until August 2023.

Also the plugins in Flatpak are tied to the runtime version, and maintaining them for two runtimes double the work, for when a new version needs to be released. Currently new versions only get published for the newest runtime.

3

I think you didn’t answer the question.

IMO, he wants to know if the runtimes stay available to download and not if they are still maintained. Staying available to download shouldn’t take much maintenance time. At worst, it takes space.

However, this is also something I’m interested in

2 Likes
4

No runtime has been removed ever, and it’s not going to change, even if it’s no longer supported by its authors.

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5

Thanks!
So that answers the question :slight_smile: