Alexander Larsson

Yesterday I released xdg-app 0.4.6 and I wanted to take some time to talk about what is new in this version what is happening around xdg-app.

libxdg-app and gnome-software integration

In the release, but disabled by default, is a new library called “libxdg-app”. It is intended for applications that want to present a user interface for managing xdg-app applications. We’re working on integrating this with gnome-software so that we can have graphical installation and updating of applications. This is work in progress, and the APIs are not yet stable, but it is very important progress that we will continue working on in the near future.

New xdg-app-builder tool

The basics of how to bundle and application with xdg-app is very simple. You initialize an application directory with build-init. For example:

$ xdg-app build-init appdir 
          org.example.ExampleApp 
          org.gnome.Sdk org.gnome.Platform 3.18

This gives you an place where you can both run the build, and store the application being build. Typically you then go to your source directory and run something like:

$ xdg-app build appdir ./configure --prefix=/app
$ xdg-app build appdir make
$ xdg-app build appdir make install

At this point the application is mostly done, but you need to run build-finish in order to export things like desktop files and icons as well as configure some application metadata and permissions, and then export the directory to an ostree repository that your users can install it from:

$ xdg-app build-finish appdir
     --command=run-example --socket=x11
     --share=network --filesystem=host
$ xdg-app build-export appdir /path/to/repo

This is pretty easy, as long as all the tools you need to build your app are in the sdk, and all the dependencies the app needs are in the runtime. However, most apps need a few extra dependencies, which was a large pain point for  people experimenting with xdg-app.

I decided to write a tool that automates this, and thus xdg-app-builder was born. It builds on experience from the Gnome continuous integration system and the nightly xdg-app build work that I did a while ago. Its based on the build-api proposal from Colin Walters, and the idea is to push as much build-knowledge upstream as possible, so that all you need to do is list your dependencies.

Here is an example json manifest that describes the above steps, plus adds a dependency:

{
  "app-id": "org.example.ExampleApp",
  "version": "master",
  "runtime": "org.gnome.Platform",
  "runtime-version": "3.18",
  "sdk": "org.gnome.Sdk",
  "command": "run-example",
  "finish-args": ["--socket=x11", 
                  "--share=network", 
                  "--filesystem=host" ],
  "build-options" : {
    "cflags": "-O2 -g",
    "env": {
        "V": "1"
    }
  },
  "cleanup": ["/include", "*.a"],
  "modules": [
    {
      "name": "some-dependency",
      "config-opts": [ "--disable-something" ],
      "cleanup": [ "/bin" ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "type": "archive",
          "url": "http://someting.org/somethinbg-1.0.tar.xz",
          "sha256": "93cc067b23c4ef7421380d3e8bd7c940b2027668446750787d7c1cb42720248e"
         }
       ]
    },
    {
      "name": "example-app",
      "sources": [
        {
          "type": "git",
          "url": "git://git.gnome.org/gimp"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

In addition to just building things this will also automatically download tarballs and pull git/bzr repos and clean up and strip things after install. It even has a caching system so that any module that did not change (in the manifest, or in the git repos) will have the results taken from the cache on consecutive builds, rather than rebuilding.

Some people have started using this, including the pitivi and glom developers, and I’ve converted the existing nightly builds of gimp and inkscape to use this instead of the custom scripts that was used before. If you’re interested in playing with xdg-app-builder those links should give you some examples to work from. There is also pretty complete docs in the manpages for xdg-app-builder.

Updated nightly builds

As I mentioned above the nightly builds were converted to xdg-app-builder, but I have also extended the set of builds with Darktable, MyPaint and Scribus, in addition to the old Gimp and Inkscape builds. The scribus build have some issues which I don’t understand (help needed), but the others seem to work well.

If you’re interested in using these, take a look at https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/NightlyBuilds which has instructions on how to get builds of xdg-app for your distro and how to use it to test the nightly builds.

Updated runtime and sdk

Since more people have started testing the Gnome runtimes I’ve fixed quite a few issues that were found in them, as well as added some new tools to the sdk. If you installed the old one, make sure to update it.

Upcoming work

The basic functionality of xdg-app is pretty much there, at least for non-sandboxed applications. The main focus of the work right now is to finish the integration with gnome-software. But after that I will return to work on sandboxing, finishing the work on the file chooser portal and the other APIs required to run apps in a sandboxed fashion.

Recently I have been working on support for a filechooser portal for sandboxed applications (in xdg-app). The way these work is that the application triggers a file chooser, then the actual user interaction happens outside the sandbox, and the application only recieves the file data after the user finished the interaction.

Ideally something like this would be completely hidden by the toolkit, and the application would just use the regular file chooser APIs. However, the Gtk+ filechooser APIs expose too much details about the file chooser dialog, which means it has to be a regular in-process widget. Unfortunately this means we can’t replace it by an out-of-process dialog.

What we need is a Gtk+ API for the file chooser that hides the details of how the dialog works. At this point I realized that this is something that has been requested a lot in a different context. Such an API would allow us to plug in platform-native file chooser dialogs.

So, I got to work, and today I landed support for native Windows file choosers in Gtk:

We will also look at implementing an OSX version of this to ensure that the APIs work for the common cases.

Now that we have this people can start porting their applications (which is quite trivial in the common case, as the APIs is very similar to the old APIs). And once the apps are ported they will automatically get support for the filechooser portal to make them work in a sandboxed environment.

So, anyone maintaining a Gtk 3 application that want to work better on other platforms, or when sandboxed should take a look at the new GtkFileChooserNative API. Right now it only exists in git, but once there is a new release it should show up in the API docs.

When reporting a bug in some software it is often common that the developer asks you to check if the bug is fixed in the latest development version. This makes a lot of sense from the perspective of a developer that gets a lot of bug reports. However, unless you are very experienced with building software this is prohibitively hard.

This is an area where xdg-app shines, because it allows you to create binary builds of desktop applications that work on any distribution. In order to demonstrate this I set up an automated build system that builds Gimp and Inkscape from the development branch every day and produces a new binary that you can easily install and run:

To make it easy to use I also created packages of xdg-app for some common distributions.

For more information about how to use these builds, see the nightly builds page.

One of the core ideas of xdg-app is that users should be running the same build of everything that the developers tested on. Not only does this mean that you can trust the testing that went into the app, but it also means that an app can run on multiple distributions, and on different version of the same distribution.

However, an application does not have bundle everything. Instead the app specifies a dependency on a runtime, which contains the base system libraries. I like to compare this to dynamic libraries, where xdg-app is “dynamically linked” to its runtime, whereas container systems (like docker) are “statically linked” (by shipping a complete runtime in each app).

This may seem weird and contrary to the first paragraph, but it turns out that this is pretty much a requirement. We want third parties to be able to produce a binary that will keep running “forever”, but the base system may need fixes or support for new hardware. We can’t expect every vendor to rebuild every application (for example some old game) each time something needs fixing on the lower levels. So, therefore we allow updates to the runtime separately from the app (although any update must be compatible).

An app can only depend on one runtime, and everything not in the runtime must be bundled with the application. There is (by design) no way to depend on multiple runtimes, or have runtimes depend on each other. However, there is something called runtime extensions. Extensions are a way to split off and make optional parts of the runtime and recombine them at runtime.

For instance, I’m working on a runtime called org.freedesktop.Platform that has the basic freedesktop libraries (X11, Mesa, DBus, etc). It has this snippet in the configuration:

[Extension org.freedesktop.Platform.Timezones]
directory=share/zoneinfo

This means that whenever another runtime called org.freedesktop.Platform.Timezones is installed its contents will replace the directory share/zoneinfo in the runtime. This is very useful as it allows the timezone info (which changes frequently) to be updated separately from the runtime.

It also has this:

[Extension org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale]
directory=share/runtime/locale
subdirectories=true

This means that if a runtime like org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale.sv is installed, it will replace the contents of share/runtime/locale/sv in the runtime. During the build all the locale data and translations are separated out into per-language runtimes which can be installed separately.

And finally, it has:

[Extension org.freedesktop.Platform.GL]
directory=lib/GL

There is no (official) runtime with this name, but if one is installed it will appear in lib/GL, and the main runtime has been programmed to look into this directory for libGL.

The idea here is that if your system uses an OpenGL driver that does not ship with the regular runtime (i.e. Mesa), or needs a more recent version of it, then you can create your own runtime with this name and get your drivers into the runtime.

For a long time this has been a theoretical solution, but recently I acquired an NVidia card in order to test this. The result is this script, which takes an upstream nvidia driver release and converts it into a runtime that matches the (soon to be released) 1.2 version of the Freedesktop runtime.

To verify that it works I created an xdg-app bundle for the Unreal Editor. Here are some screenshots of a sandboxed version of unreal to show this working:

While runtimes can’t have dependencies on other runtimes, they can be build from the same base, and thus be compatible. For instance, the official Gnome runtime takes the Freedesktop runtime and adds the Gnome modules to it. Since we have the same ABI  we can reuse the same extensions. The two runtimes have different versions (Gnome is 3.18, Freedesktop is 1.2), so we have to specify the version (which is otherwise infered by the runtime version). Here is how the Gnome runtime config looks:

[Extension org.freedesktop.Platform.GL]
version=1.2
directory=lib/GL

I hope to have stable builds out of the Freedesktop 1.2 and Gnome 3.18 runtimes shortly, so that other people can play with them. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to distribute the unreal editor app.

I’m now back from a week in Cambridge at the developer experience hackfest. This was a great event, it was a lot of fun to meet people again, and we got a lot of things done. I spent a lot of time talking to people about things related to xdg-app and sandboxed applications, both spreading information and actually implementing features.

I spent some time with Emmanuele, Ryan and Lars working on glib stuff, which resulted in the G_DECLARE_*_TYPE macros finally being merged. Additionally I reviewed the new list model abstraction which I hope we can land soon, and Ryan and I worked out a new fancy __attribute__(cleanup) approach that we hope to merge into glib soon.

We also worked a bit on Gtk+ OpenGL support. Based on feedback from early users we’re doing some changes in how GL contexts are created to allow you to configure them in more detail. We also decided that we want to completely drop support for legacy OpenGL contexts, as these had issues cooperating with Core 3.2 contexts, and because we don’t live in the 90s anymore. Carlos was working on converting GtkPopover to use (override redirect) toplevels on X11, and I gave him moral support and generally hated on ancient crappy X11 behaviour.

Props to Collabora and Philip for arranging a great event!