14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME and Flatpak developer Bastien Nocera reported the other day on his personal blog on an upcoming feature that's about to be implemented in the next release of the Flatpak universal binary format.
The GUADEC conference for GNOME developers is taking place these days in Karlsruhe, Germany, between August 12 and 14, and it looks like Mr. Nocera was supposed to give a lightning talk about what would be coming to Flatpak later in the year, as well as to run a contest related to his presentation, whose prize was a piece of hardware.
"Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to finish the work that I set out to do, encountering a couple of bugs that set me back," said Bastien Nocera in the blog announcement. "Hopefully, this will get resolved post-GUADEC, so you can expect some announcements later on in the year."
Introducing Flatpak cross-compilation support
It appears that the GUADEC presentation won't happen, nor will the said Flatpak contest, so Bastien Nocera is now happy to inform us about some of the upcoming features that will soon be implemented in the universal binary format. As such, the next Flatpak version will be supporting four methods of compiling apps for a different architecture.
These are native compilation, cross-compilation, virtual machine, and the fourth one mixes the latter two into a method called the QEmu user-space emulator. Those of you interested in testing out the QEMU user-space emulator and running it in a container can check out Mr. Nocera's announcement for all the juicy details.
A Git commit of the new hack is now available if you feel adventurous. If not, you'll have to wait at least a couple of weeks to get the new Flatpak release with all the cross-compilation goodies. In the meantime, don't hesitate to check out the official Flatpak website to start using these universal binary packages on your distro.