It's coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you

Apr 26, 2017 21:15 GMT  ·  By

Alex Larsson from the Flatpak team announces the release and immediate availability of the third maintenance update to the Flatpak 0.9 series of the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework.

Flatpak 0.9.3 comes about 20 days after the release of Flatpak 0.9.2, and adds a great number of changes to flatpak-builder, among which we can mention the ability for the "flatpak-builder --run" command to grant D-Bus access to the app, and support for "bootstrap.sh" to be recognized as an autogen.sh alternative.

To be able to pre-seed downloaded sources, Flatpak gained support for the "--extra-sources=" argument, along with support for the "--bundle-sources" argument, which produces a runtime using the sources employed for building the application. Moreover, Flatpak is now capable of handling trailing whitespace in Git submodule URIs.

Another cool feature that landed in the Flatpak 0.9.3 release is progress reporting while downloading files, and it looks like a linux32 personality will now be automatically set when cross-compiling 32-bit applications on 64-bit architectures (e.g. i386 on x86_64).

flatpak-builder also received support to fall back to not using rofiles-fuse if it isn't present, as well as the ability to print warnings for unhandled JSON properties. The "flatpak-builder --run" command should now work if the "--extra-data" argument is in the finish arguments.

Furthermore, build-commands are now taking into consideration when deciding if the build cache is stale, and the paths for the module dependencies and module includes were made relative to the included module instead of the "base" JSON file.

Non-default WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable now supported

Among other changes implemented in Flatpak 0.9.3, we can mention the fact that non-default WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable is now supported, the build-export command is now capable of always exporting directories as executable and readable, and it's possible to report the Flatpak version in the HTTP request user agent.

A new "flatpak repo" command was added to offer developers various options for maintaining a Flatpak repository, the "flatpak info" command can now handle more than one branch and report extra information better, and it's possible to handle app IDs that end with .desktop when the appstream data is being generated.

Last but not least, the "build-update-repo --generate-static-deltas" command will now fork the work process instead of using threads. This change was necessary to avoid problems where Flatpak used a lot of system memory in a single process. You can check out the full changelog below and download Flatpak 0.9.3 right now.

Flatpak 0.9.3 Changelog