85b7eea4f1
Currently if the user doesn't specify a remote name to the install command, Flatpak chooses the first one that has a matching ref, either with or without user interaction depending on whether --assumeyes/-y was used. Then if more than one remote ref is similar to the one specified, the user is prompted to choose between them. I think this asymmetry doesn't make much sense; why not have the user choose between remotes just as they choose between refs? For example, the string "libre" matches refs from both flathub and eos-apps, so if I do "flatpak install -y libre" a remote is arbitrarily chosen for me but I'm still prompted to choose between the refs (since -y can't choose for you when there are mutliple choices). So this commit changes the install command implementation to present the user with a list of remotes that have matching refs all at once rather than one at a time. The reason I didn't implement it this way at first is that I was worried about the performance impact, but in testing I'm not able to measure a difference between stopping at the first remote with a match and checking every remote (although the story might be different if you have many remotes or don't have up-to-date metadata downloaded). If there's an error searching a remote, it's treated as a warning so that one misconfigured remote doesn't take down the whole operation with it. This commit also updates the unit tests so they continue to succeed. Closes: #2288 Approved by: matthiasclasen
Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux.
See https://flatpak.org/ for more information.
Community discussion happens in #flatpak on Freenode and on the mailing list.
Read documentation for the flatpak commandline tools and for the libflatpak library API.
Contributing
Flatpak welcomes contributions from anyone! Here are some ways you can help:
- Fix one of the issues and submit a PR
- Update flatpak's translations and submit a PR
- Update flatpak's documentation, hosted at http://docs.flatpak.org and developed over in flatpak-docs
- Find a bug and submit a detailed report including your OS, flatpak version, and the steps to reproduce
- Add your favorite application to Flathub by writing a flatpak-builder manifest and submitting it
- Improve the Flatpak support in your favorite Linux distribution
Hacking
Flatpak uses a traditional autoconf-style build mechanism. To build just do
./configure [args]
make
make install
Dependencies you will need include: autoconf, automake, libtool, bison, gettext, gtk-doc, gobject-introspection, libcap, libarchive, libxml2, libsoup, gpgme, polkit, libXau, ostree, json-glib, appstream, libseccomp (or their devel packages).
Most configure arguments are documented in ./configure --help. However,
there are some options that are a bit more complicated.
Flatpak relies on a project called
Bubblewrap for the
low-level sandboxing. By default, an in-tree copy of this is built
(distributed in the tarball or using git submodules in the git
tree). This will build a helper called flatpak-bwrap. If your system
has a recent enough version of Bubblewrap already, you can use
--with-system-bubblewrap to use that instead.
Bubblewrap can run in two modes, either using unprivileged user
namespaces or setuid mode. This requires that the kernel supports this,
which some distributions disable. For instance, Debian and Arch
(linux kernel v4.14.5 or later), support user namespaces with the kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone sysctl enabled.
If unprivileged user namespaces are not available, then Bubblewrap must be built as setuid root. This is believed to be safe, as it is designed to do this. Any build of Bubblewrap supports both unprivileged and setuid mode, you just need to set the setuid bit for it to change mode.
However, this does complicate the installation a bit. If you pass
--with-priv-mode=setuid to configure (of Flatpak or Bubblewrap) then
make install will try to set the setuid bit. However that means you
have to run make install as root. Alternatively, you can pass
--enable-sudo to configure and it will call sudo when setting the
setuid bit. Alternatively you can enable setuid completely outside of
the installation, which is common for example when packaging Bubblewrap
in a .deb or .rpm.
There are some complications when building Flatpak to a different
prefix than the system-installed version. First of all, the newly
built Flatpak will look for system-installed flatpaks in
$PREFIX/var/lib/flatpak, which will not match existing installed
flatpaks. You can use --with-system-install-dir=/var/lib/flatpak
to make both installations use the same location.
Secondly, Flatpak ships with a root-privileged policykit helper for
system-installation, called flatpak-system-helper. This is dbus
activated (on the system-bus) and if you install in a non-standard
location it is likely that this will not be found by dbus and
policykit. However, if the system installation is synchronized,
you can often use the system installed helper instead - at least
if the two versions are close in versions.