this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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What does known-good mean? What if a security vulnerability is found in one of the dependencies. With an old-style distribution there is a security team that monitors security reports and they will provide a fixed package. With flatpaks it's not clear to me if those developers will monitor each dependency for security vulnerabilities and how they will handle that. Will users even be informed about a security issue, will a fix be backported or will it only be available in the latest version?
Known-good meaning a tested and working configuration approved by the developers/maintainers.
Flatpak is just another model of distribution. There isn't really anything that needs to change here. The bugs are fixed upstream and they get pushed via the method of distribution, which is Flathub in this case.
The security team in a given distribution is charged with getting upstream fixes backported and shipped. There's no need for this role because they're just shipped directly in most cases.
The developers are usually the ones doing the fixes in the first place.
Well, fixes don't normally need to be backported because flatpaks are usually fresh. They're just built normally in most cases.
For notifications, you'd have to follow the relevant projects directly.
There are a few assumptions in here in order for that to work: the known-good version needs to be the latest upstream version (otherwise you might not have the latest security fixes) and users need to be comfortable always using the latest flatpak version. Some users might be more comfortable staying on a known stable version for some time.
Right, and each project will have its own way of handling security issues (particularly when it comes to older versions). Will they point out that versions x - y of their flatpak are affected by a security issue in component z?