14 DAY TRIAL // Today, October 25, 2016, Alex Larsson had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Flatpak 0.6.13, a new major update for the universal binary package format for GNU/Linux distributions.
For those not in the know, Flatpak is an application container that lets you package your open source project as a standalone binary that can be easily distributed across multiple Linux-based operating systems, independent of the package manager of that particular OS. Flatpak 0.6.13 is now the latest version, coming three weeks after Flatpak 0.6.12, and it looks like it's the biggest so far, bringing app layering support to flatpak-builder, as well as support for extension directories.
"In addition to using a runtime as an extension, Flatpak apps can now use regular directories in ~/.local/share/flatpak/extension and /var/lib/flatpak/extension For example, if you create a directory called org.freedesktop.Platform.GStreamer.MyPlugins/x86_64/1.4 there it will be used as a source for GStreamer plugins for all runtimes based on the freedesktop 1.4 runtime," reads today's release notes.
Greatly improved CLI support, ability to launch a runtime directly
But that's not all, as Flatpak 0.6.13 also ships today with greatly improved command-line support that offers users updated arguments for installing, updating, and uninstalling Flatpack packages, better DBus proxy filtering, support for defining the default branch per remote, support for URIs to the "remote-add" and "install --from" commands, as well as support for the "--finish-only" and "--allow-missing-runtimes" parameters to flatpak-builder.
Flatpak is now capable of launching a runtime directly, supports checking and downloading of application runtime dependencies, supports generic policies in the app metadata, and it's capable of exporting icons for themes other than hicolor as well. Last but not least, the bubblewrap 0.1.3 security update is now bundled, and it's possible for applications to list a set of URIs that'll be downloaded with the app itself. Flatpak 0.6.13 is now available for download from its homepage.