"New" Flatpak logo
A few moments ago we have published an article in which we talked about the sensations that snap and flatpak packs give us. Update frequency is something that flatpacks are ahead of, which doesn't always mean better, and that's something we can also see in the software they use to package software. Only two months after the earlier version, It is now available Flatpack 1.15.0.
Among the most outstanding novelties, there are changes regarding the compilation: from now on this type of packages can be compiled using Meson instead of Autotools. To be able to do this you need to use Meson 0.53.0 or later and Python 3.5 or later. They say the Autotools build system is likely to be removed during the 1.15 or 1.17 cycle.
Other Flatpak 1.15 news
This version allows the system call modify_ldt as part of --alow=multiarch, which increases the attack surface, but is necessary when using 16-bit executables in some versions of WINE. The gssproxy socket can also be shared, which acts as a portal for Kerberos authentication and allows apps to use Kerberos authentication without a hole in the sandbox. Finally, an httpbackend variable has been added to flatpak.pc, allowing dependent objects like GNOME Software to detect if they are compatible with libflatpak.
Also, these bugs have been fixed:
- Terminate the flatpak-session-helper and flatpak-portal services when sessioning, so that applications don't inherit Wayland socket addresses and X11 socket addresses.
- When using the fish shell, a previously set XDG_DATA_DIRS is not overwritten.
- It doesn't try to enable HTTP 2 if you're linked to a version of libcurl that doesn't support it.
- Stop systemd reporting the helper-session as failed when terminated by a signal.
- Fixed a warning when listing a document without permissions.
- Fixed compilation with GLib 2.66.x (as used in Debian 11).
- Fixed compilation with GLib 2.58.x (as used in Debian 10).
- Generated files have been made more playable.
- Translation updates: cs, id, pl, pt_BR
Flatpak 1.15 has been announced less than 24 hours ago, and can be downloaded from this link on GitHub, where all the information about this release has been published. In the next few days/weeks it will arrive in the official repositories of most Linux distributions.