14 DAY TRIAL // Less than a week since the launch of the fourth maintenance update to the Flatpak 0.8 series of the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XGD-App), Alex Larsson announced today Flatpak 0.9.1.
Flatpak 0.9.1 appears to be the first point release to the major Flatpak 0.9 series, and we say major because this milestone adds numerous improvements compared to the 0.8 branch, especially to the build system. The biggest change appears to be a new Ninja-based build system called "cmake-ninja."
"This release mostly has changes to flatpak-builder and the build machinery. All flatpaks built with this version can run on Flatpak 0.8.x, but there has been additions and minor changes in flatpak-builder that may require minor changes to existing builder manifests," said Alex Larsson in the release notes.
What's new in Flatpak 0.9.1
New features of the Flatpak 0.9.1 release include implementation of build-extension and build-runtime properties to flatpak-builder so you can build runtimes and extensions a lot more easily than before, along with support for the "--from-git=URL" argument, which fetches the JSON manifest and other related files straight from a Git repository.
The build cache was updated as well, this time to make it possible to no longer invalidate the cache of another architecture when building Flatpaks on one Arch. Additionally, there is now better support for the SDK (Software Development Kit) to no longer rebuild the app when the version of the installed SDK changes.
Another build system was implemented in the Flatpak 0.9.1 release, namely "simple," which just runs a set of shell commands that you can specify in the "build-commands" property. Please note that the "simple" build system does not rely on configure, nor make. Additionally, the Flatpak build system received support for D-Bus proxies.
Among other changes, we can mention a brand-new flatpak-builder argument called "--build-shell=MODULE" and designed to extract and prepare the sources for a defined module and run a build sandbox inside it, as well as support for cloning all Git repositories with "fsckObjects=true" to make sure they're valid.
A few other changes have also been implemented in the Flatpak 0.9.1, and you can see them all in the changelog attached below if you're curious to know what exactly was improved, fixed, or added. OS integrators can download the source tarball right now from the GitHub page of the project to update their infrastructures.