14 DAY TRIAL // Just two days after releasing the 0.8.5 maintenance update for the Flatpak 0.8 stable series of the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, Alex Larsson publishes a new build from the 0.9 branch.
We still don't know if the Flatpak 0.9 series is a stable branch or not, but it's already been adopted by the developers of the Arch Linux and Solus operating systems. Flatpak 0.9.2 is here about 22 days after the first maintenance update in the new series, version 0.9.1.
While the changelog for today's Flatpak 0.9.2 release is quite big, we can't help but notice that many of the changes have been backported from the Flatpak 0.8.5 stable release announced on April 3, 2017. These include the recently discovered memory leaks and a use-after-free in the dbus-proxy.
It comes with the same improved update system from Flatpak 0.8.5 to no longer allow older Flatpak versions to be installed, improves detection of "unmaintained" system extensions, along with the automatic detection of --from in the "flatpak install" command to detect flatpakref extensions in URIs that end in a query string.
The minimum Glibc and Automake versions, namely 2.44 and 1.13.4, imposed in Flatpak 0.8.5 are also needed for building Flatpak 0.9.2 on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, as well as the latest OSTree release, though OSTree trivial-httpd is now longer required for the tests, as SimpleHTTPServer is now used by default.
GPG signatures are now supported by OCI
But the Flatpak 0.9.2 release also comes with some changes on its own. These include support for GPG signatures in OCI, which now works with the system-helper for unprivileged system-wide installation of Flatpak packages, and experimental support for the new OSTree bare-user-only repo mode to allow Flatpaks to run on filesystems that don't feature xattrs (Extended Attributes) support.
Other than that, it looks like the builder got a lot of attention for this cycle, and it now offers new disable-fsckobjects and commit properties for Git sources, correctly handles absolute path names in the specified command, and implements support for the "--default-branch" argument to define the Flatpak branch to build when the manifest doesn't specify one.
Furthermore, the builder's manifest file format documentation was split into its own manpage, and specifying sdk-extensions are now supported for app manifests, which will now be automatically removed when creating the platform to allow for the creation of sdk-specific extensions. You can find the complete changelog attached below and you can download the Flatpak 0.9.2 source tarball right now from the announcement page.