The Flatpak 0.10.1 update is now available for download

Nov 30, 2017 12:07 GMT  ·  By

The Flatpak 0.10 stable branch of the open-source universal binary format for GNU/Linux distributions has been updated recently to first point release.

Flatpak 0.10.1 is now the latest version of the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XDG-App), adding new commands to display information about applications in a remote (flatpak remote-info) and to allow you to search the appstream data from the command-line (flatpak search).

New command "flatpak remote-info" shows information about applications in a remote. In particular the --log operation shows the history and can be used in combination with flatpak upate --commit=XYZ to roll back to a previous version," explains Alex Larsson in the GitHub release notes.

To ensure the search works correctly, the "flatpak update" command has been modified to also update the appstream data for all configured remotes. On top of that, Flatpak 0.10.1 updates the support for OCI remotes, though the functionality is still in development and remains disabled by default for now.

Flatpak now works on stateless systems, supports native themes

Flatpak now works on stateless systems, which is possible due to the  ability of the "flatpak remote-add" command to function as a user when the /var/lib/flatpak directory is empty. It can also allow automatic installation of GTK+ themes that match the active system theme of your GNU/Linux distribution.

The Flatpak 0.10.1 update also adds support for "flatpak build --log-session/system-bus", which is similar to what the "flatpak run" command already does, updates the "flatpak build --readonly" command to run with the target directory mounted as read-only, and can handle cases where /etc/resolv.conf is a symlink.

Lastly, the /etc and /usr dirs are now exposed in the /run/host file withing the Flatpak app if it has full file system access, and Flatpak can now fallback to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable if a runtime does not have the /usr/bin/ldconfig binary. Flatpak 0.10.1 is available for download as a source tarball from GitHub.