{{ posts }}...
It's probably not your fault. On a cache miss, there are two things a reverse proxy (which Fastly is to us) can do. It can make the client wait until the proxy itself fetches the requested content and then serve it, with subsequent requests being served from the cache. From a user's perspective, it means staring at "hung" process, and people tend not to be understanding when a program is stuck…
There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system…
Mistakes were made¹, and after recent maintenance , Jordan asked Infrastructure Team if there is a chance GNOME Nightly (and its younger sibling GNOME OS) could be moved somewhere with faster network and more storage. After short discussion, we decided to move it to AWS (thanks to promotional credits for open source projects ). The new server has three times more space, uses SSD instead of HDD,…
One of the reasons Flathub is relatively fast regardless of where it’s used is CDN service provided by Fastly . This is not a good thing for users from China though, where Fastly, and thus Flathub, is blocked. Similar services are operating in China, but being an open source project, it’s easy to guess our budget is close to zero. Felix Yan , a fellow Arch developer, suggested some VPS providers…
The way Flathub infrastructure works is not complicated for current trends, but there are enough moving parts to make debugging transient issues tricky. When a user starts a download, Flatpak connects to CDN provided by Fastly . CDN connects to one of two front servers, VPSes acting as caching load balancers/proxies in front of hub , the main server exposing ostree repositories and publishing new…
Flathub is primarily built around GitHub , where applications manifests and infrastructure code live. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that code hosting platform isn't exactly a go-to place for the community to connect, even if one slaps a discussion label on an issue. Timezones and personal commitments mean that IRC is also not an ideal platform for discussion, and Flathub does not have a mailing…
One could say that the Flathub team is working silently behind the scenes most of the time and it wouldn't be far from the truth. Unless changes are substantial, they are rarely announced elsewhere than under a pull request or issue on GitHub. Let's change it a bit and try to summarize what was going on with Flathub over the last year. Beta branch and test builds 2019 started off strong. In…
Although I gave up on tuning AwesomeWM configuration years ago and switched completely to GNOME, I still spend most of my time in the terminal. Instead of navigating to photos directory in Nautilus, I instinctively spawn a new terminal window with Super + Enter and type eog ~/pics/filename.jpg . This has become harder as I replaced almost all desktop applications provided by my distribution of…
To work around restrictions surrounding redistribution and repackaging of proprietary applications, Flatpak supports storing only the URL and metadata needed for verifying file integrity in the app bundle. During installation, such files are downloaded and extracted completely locally, thus not breaking the license. However, this solution is not ideal. If the vendor decides to use an unversioned…