I’m close to getting this working with Flatpak myself but I’ve run into some hurdles that I need help overcoming. The progress I’ve made on Flatpaking the app myself is at https://github.com/Riftr/intelpy/tree/master/buildscripts/flatpak-scripts. The build-flatpak.sh is the commands I’m running to build it and so that the build is reproducible in the future.
IntelPy is a PyQt5 app made with Python and a few Python libraries from PyPi. It’s cross-platform and I already package it using Pyinstaller for Windows. I’d like to get a Flatpak together for the next (2.0) release for Linux users. It needs access to a few directories under ~ to function and save its configuration, as well as access to its own resources under /usr/share/intelpy.
Any help getting this over the line is appreciated, I’ve spend quite a few hours getting to this point!
What exactly do you need help with? What is currently working & what still needs work?
In general (not flatpak specific), your application should follow the XDG Base Directory Specification. In the best case, this would allow the flatpak to work without any additional filesystem-permissions: config, cache & data folders are always put inside the app specific folder under ~/.var/app/.
Additionally, you could implement support for XDG Desktop portal to dynamically grant access to system resources, e.g. user data (anywhere outside ~/.var/app).
All your application data you must put into the /app-prefix. /usr is provided by the runtime & does not contain any application data. You’ll have to change your prefix if this is hard-coded in your application.
And I think a topic is more visible when created in the “General” category as “Requests” seems to be filtered from the latest topics. “Requests” is only used to indicate user interest to flatpak a specific application.