14 DAY TRIAL // A little over a month after the major Flatpak 0.6.13 release, Alex Larsson informs us today, November 29, 2016, about the general availability of a new maintenance update to the universal binary package format for Linux-based operating systems.
Flatpak 0.6.14 is now the latest and most advanced version of the universal Linux app container that aims to become the future of application distribution across all major GNU/Linux platforms. Bundled with bubblewrap 0.1.4, the new Flatpak release requires OSTree 2016.14, which makes some old workarounds unnecessary.
Another interesting change implemented in today's Flatpak 0.6.14 release is the ability to ignore dependencies installed only for the user when installing a Flatpak package system-wide. Additionally, Flatpak's "install --from" command was updated to re-use existing remotes, which should avoid making redundant origin remotes.
Bug fixes and general improvements
Flatpak 0.6.14 also addresses various bugs reported by users since Flatpak 0.6.13 or a previous release. For example, it makes "--filesystem=$dir" functional when $dir is a symlink-to-directory, allows "--filesystem=$file" to expose UNIX sockets to a sandboxed app, and fixes a regression that broke "flatpak update --appstream remotename."
Other than that, Flatpak now hides all the directories in ~/.var/app and ~/.local/share/flatpak in the sandbox, by default, except the app. A new option called "--filesystem=$dir:create" helps with the creation of the destination of the app if it does not exist yet, and support for xdg-[config|cache|data] was added to "--filesystem=".
"--filesystem= now supports for xdg-[config|cache|data]. This allows you access to the host versions of these xdg dirs. Additionally, if you use these with a subdirectory, like: --filesystem=xdg-config/subdir then that subdirectory on the host will be shared with the per-app instance of the xdg-dir," read the release notes.
Last but not least, the builder was updated to be able to correctly handle app-ids that include dashes in their names, and the experimental OCI file format support is now capable of creating an OCI image. You can download Flatpak 0.6.14 using the link above, and it's also coming soon to a distro near you.