Re: What are the plans for bwrap and flatpak?
On Wed, 2017-06-07 at 11:06 +0000, Christian Stadelmann wrote:
Hi all,
I've been using flatpak packages for a while and like the idea of
bwrap pretty much, mainly because it improves privilege separation
and management. I'm not 100% convinced on flatpak, but it keeps
improving. Anyway I think both projects have completely separate
(though compatible) goals and might need to be handled separately.
Now I am curious:
1. Do you plan on sandboxing GUI applications shipped through
rpm/dnf? If yes, is there a timeline? Are regressions (sandboxed app
vs. same app without sandbox) considered bugs, and if yes, where
should I file bug reports?
2. Do you plan replacing the GNOME packages shipped through rpm/dnf
by packages shipped through flatpak? Or is this an option for the far
future? Or do you want to keep shipping two separate ways of
installing GUI applications?
Thanks for asking.
First, bubblewrap is really an internal implementation detail of
flatpak, and doesn't really need any plans per se.
The plans for flatpak in Fedora on a high level look like this:
1) gnome-software gains support for managing flatpak apps (installing,
updating, uninstalling apps, runtimes and remotes). This part will be
in pretty good shape in Fedora 26, and you should be able to use it
with existing upstream flatpak repositories, like the ones listed on
www.flatpak.org.
2) We are not planning to sandbox rpms. The sandboxing is intrinsically
tied to using flatpak at runtime for setting up the container, and
running the app in it. And the runtime concept does not really have an
equivalent in the rpm world.
3) For reporting issues, as always: use your best judgement. Report
bugs where they are likely to be seen by the right people. I don't
think comparing rpm and flatpak versions item by item and filing a huge
amount of 'regression' bugs is going to be useful.
4) We are planning to generate flatpaks from existing rpms for desktop
application. For this, we will be reusing as much of the modularity
initiative as we can. Owen Taylor and David King are working on this
for F27.