Path issues with flatpak and homebrew

castrojo · November 27, 2023, 1:44pm

Hey ya’ll! I’ve been experimenting with using homebrew as companion to Flatpaks/Flathub to provide CLI apps.

I’ve been using it fulltime for months and it’s been a great experience!

However at some point I installed a package that pulled in pk11-kit, which it stuck in /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin. This is where homebrew sticks binaries. Since this path is first in my $PATH, my flatpak installation started using it.

This resulted in both my discord and steam flatpaks using the homebrew pk11-kit, which broke both apps. There are millions of homebrew installs on linux so I was perplexed on how there haven’t been more issues like this.

I was wondering if there maybe was a way to set a specific environment variable for flatpak to ignore these paths to keep both systems decoupled? Any insight would be appreciated! Thanks!

Issue: Homebrew's path setting conflict with host binaries · Issue #687 · ublue-os/bluefin · GitHub

razzeee · November 27, 2023, 4:46pm

Hey, not to be rude, but you probably will have more success raising this at Issues · flatpak/flatpak · GitHub

castrojo · November 28, 2023, 12:11am

No worries, thanks for the pointer!

github.com/flatpak/flatpak

[Question]: Isolating the system/CLI path from flatpak?

opened 12:07AM - 28 Nov 23 UTC

castrojo

Originally [posted here](https://discourse.flathub.org/t/path-issues-with-flatpa…k-and-homebrew/5501) but told to bring it into the issue tracker: I've been experimenting with Homebrew as a companion to flatpak/flathub to provide CLI apps. I’ve been using it fulltime for months and it’s been a great experience! However at some point I installed a package that pulled in pk11-kit, which it stuck in `/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin`. This is where homebrew sticks binaries. Since this path is first in my $PATH, my flatpak installation started using it. This resulted in both my Discord and Steam flatpaks using the homebrew pk11-kit, which broke both apps. There are [millions](https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/os-version/365d/) of homebrew installs on linux so I was perplexed on how there haven’t been more issues like this. I was wondering if there maybe was a way to set a specific environment variable for flatpak to ignore these paths to keep both systems decoupled? Throwing it in a container will work, but I'm trying to see if we could remove that little bit of friction that users have to deal with by using toolbox/distrobox. Any insight would be appreciated! Thanks!