This update includes numerous improvements and bug fixes

May 23, 2017 22:42 GMT  ·  By

Alex Larsson announced earlier today the availability of yet another monthly maintenance release of the Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework.

Coming approximately one month after the previous update, Flatpak 0.9.4 is now the latest release in the 0.9 series of the project, adding a large number of improvements to its wide range of commands, as well as fixing some of those nasty issues reported by users lately.

Requiring ostree 2017.6 and bubblewrap 0.1.8 components, Flatpak 0.9.4 offers better progress reporting in both the command-line and user interface, improves the output of various commands, including list, info, remotes, and remote-ls, and implements a "flatpak repo" command to view information about local repositories.

The "flatpak build" command was updated to kill all the processes in the sandbox when it exits, the "flatpak update --subpath=..." was also improved to update the app event when there's no new upstream version and the subpath is different from the one installed, and exports are now whitelisted.

Starting with Flatpak 0.9.4, all exported GNOME Shell search providers are automatically disabled by default, all exported mimetypes are rewritten to only allow globs, and the paths passed to exported desktop files are now automatically created as documents to allow access to the arguments.

Additionally, all Flatpak caches are now stored in the hidden ~/.cache folder in your Home directory (or $XDG_CACHE_HOME) instead of ~/.local/share/flatpak/system-cache, and a new AddFull method has been implemented in the Document Portal to allow exporting of multiple files required by a certain target app.

flatpak-build improvements, other changes

Among other changes implemented in the Flatpak 0.9.4 release, we can mention that both /etc/hosts and /etc/hosts.conf files of the host operating system are now exposed in the sandbox, and a brand new flag called "--no-static-deltas" can be used for installations or update operations without the need to use static deltas.

Other than that, there's now a version field available for all exported D-Bus interfaces, TMPDIR has been unset in the sandbox by default, unless set otherwise, titles and default branches will be automatically updated from the remote, which can now redirect to a new GPG key or URL.

"A remote can now redirect to a new URL and/or a new GPG key, by using build-update-repo --redirect-url=URL --gpg-import=FILE. When clients see this they permanently change the local configuration. This is very useful when migrating official repositories," said Alex Larsson in the release notes.

Flatpak 0.9.4 is also here to add an extra layer of performance improvements when installing apps, and it looks like the branchname is now included in the commit objects when exporting a build. On the other hand, the flatpak-builder received a bunch of new features too, such as support for appdata screenshot mirroring and a cppflags property.

To view all the changes added in the Flatpak 0.9.4 update, we recommend that you check out the full release notes attached below. OS integrators can download the Flatpak 0.9.4 source archive right now from the project's GitHub page if they want to update their infrastructures to the most advanced Flatpak release.

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