Trying out GTK+ 4

I was asked today if there is already a Flatpak runtime that includes GTK+ 3.94. A very natural question. GTK+ 4 and flatpak are both cool, so of course you want to try them together.

But the answer is: No, GTK+ 4 is not included in a runtime yet.

It is still a bit early for that – the master branch of the GNOME runtime includes development versions of libraries, but those are libraries that are following the GNOME release schedule, where we can expect them to have a stable release in time for GNOME 3.30 in September. That is not the case for GTK+ 4.

However, that does not mean you cannot take your first steps with GTK+ 3.94 and flatpak right now. Flatpak is a flexible system and the bundling capabilities are very well-suited for this kind of scenario.

Just add GTK+ to the list of bundled modules in your flatpak manifest:

...
 "modules": [
   {
     "name": "gtk+",
     "buildsystem": "meson",
     "builddir": true,
     "config-opts": [
       "--prefix="/app",
       "--libdir="lib",
       "-Ddemos=false",
       "-Dbuild-tests=false"
     ],
     "sources": [
       "type": "archive",
       "url": "https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/3.94/gtk+-3.94.0.tar.xz"
     ]
   },
   {
     "name": "your-app",
     ...
   }
 ]
...

If you are more adventurous, you can also build the GTK+ master branch from git, to see our latest progress towards GTK+ 4 as it happens.

To see a complete example of a flatpak manifest bundling GTK+ and its dependencies, you can look at corebird.

We have the beginnings of a GTK+ 3 → 4 migration guide in the GTK+ documentation. If you give it a try, please let us know what works and what is missing.

One way to so so is to file an issue. But you also welcome to come by the GTK+ BoF at Guadec in Almeria and tell us in person.

Flatpak in detail, part 2

The first post in this series looked at runtimes and extensions. Here, we’ll look at how flatpak keeps the applications and runtimes on your system organized, with installations, repositories, branches, commits and deployments.

Installations and repositories

An installation is a place on your filesystem where flatpak can install apps and runtimes. By default, flatpak has a system-wide installation in /var/lib/flatpak, and a user installation in $HOME/.local/share/flatpak.

It is possible to define additional system-wide installations by placing a key file in /etc/flatpak/installations.d. For example, this can be used to keep apps on a portable drive.

Part of the data that flatpak keeps for each installation is a list of remotes. A remote is a reference to an ostree repository that is available somewhere on the network.

Each installation also has its own local ostree repository (for example, the system-wide installation has its repo in /var/lib/flatpak/repo). You can explore the contents of these repositories using the ostree utility;

$ ostree --repo=$HOME/.local/share/flatpak/repo/ refs
gnome-nightly:appstream/x86_64
flathub:runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale/x86_64/1.6
flathub:app/de.wolfvollprecht.UberWriter/x86_64/stable
...

Branches and versions

Similar to git, ostree organizes the data in a repository in commits, which are grouped in branches. Commits are identified by a hash and branches are identified by a name.

While ostree does not care about the format of a branch name, flatpak uses branch names of the form $KIND/$ID/$ARCH/$BRANCH to uniquely identify branches.

Here are some examples:

app/org.inkscape.Inkscape/x86_64/stable
runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/master

Most of the  time, it is clear from the context if an app or runtime is being named, and only one architecture is relevant. For this case, flatpak allows a shorthand notation for branch names omitting the $KIND and $ARCH parts: $ID//$BRANCH.

In this notation, the above examples shrink to:

org.inkscape.Inkscape//stable
org.gnome.Platform//master

Deployments

Installing an app or runtime really consists of two steps: first, flatpak caches that data in the local repo of the installation, and then it deploys it, which means it creates a check-out of the branch from the local repo. The check-outs are organized in a folder structure that reflects the branch name organization.

For example, Inkscape will be checked-out in $HOME/.local/share/flatpak/app/org.inkscape.Inkscape/x86_64/stable/$COMMIT, where $COMMIT is the hash of the commit that is being deployed.

It is possible to have multiple commits from the same branch deployed, but one of them is considered active and will be used by default. Flatpak maintains symlink in the check-out directory that points at the active commit.

It is also possible to have multiple branches of an app or runtime deployed at the same time; the directory structure of checkouts is designed to allow that. One of the branches is considered current. Flatpak maintains a symlink at the toplevel of the checkout that points at the current checkout.

Flatpak can run an app from any deployed commit, regardless whether it is active or current or not. To run a particular commit, you can use the –commit option of flatpak run.

The relevance of being active and current is that flatpak exports some data (in particular, desktop files) from the active commit of the current branch, by symlinking it into ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports,  where for example gnome-shell will find it and allow you to run the app from the overview.

Note: Even though it is perfectly ok to have multiple versions of the same app installed, running more than one at the same time will typically not work, since the different versions will claim the app ID as their unique bus name on the session bus. A way around this limitation is to explicitly give one of the versions a different ID, for example, by appending a “.nightly” suffix.

Application data

One last aspect of filesystem organization to mention here is that every app that is run with flatpak gets a some filesystem space to use for permanent storage. This space is in $HOME/.var/app/$ID, and it has subdirectories called cache, config and data. At runtime, flatpak sets the XDG_CACHE_DIR, XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME environment variables to point at these directores.

For example, the persistent data from the inkscape flatpak can be found in $HOME/.var/app/org.inkscape.Inkscape.

Summary

Flatpak installations may look a bit intimidating with their deep diretory tree, but they have a well-defined structure and this post hopefully helps to explain the various components.

Flatpak in detail

At this point, Flatpak is a mature system for deploying and running desktop applications. It has accumulated quite some sophistication over time, which can make it appear more complicated than it is.

In this post, I’ll try to look in depth at some of the core concepts behind Flatpak, namely runtimes and extensions.

In the beginning: bundles

At its very core, the idea behind Flatpak is to bundle applications with their dependencies, and ship them as a self-contained unit.  There are good reasons that bundling is attractive for application developers:

  • There is a much bigger chance that the app will run on an arbitrary end-user system, which may have different versions of libraries, different themes, or a different kernel
  • You are not relying on all the different update mechanisms and policies of Linux distributions
  • Distribution updates to your dependencies will not break your app behind your back
  • You can test the same code that your users run

Best of both worlds: runtimes

In the age-old debate beween bundlers and packagers, there are good arguments on both sides. The usual arguments against bundling are:

  • Code duplication. If a library gets hit by a security issue you have to fix it in all the apps that bundle it
  • Wastefulness. if every app ships an entire library stack, this blows up the required bandwidth for downloads and the required disk space for installing them

With this in mind, Flatpak early on introduced the concept of runtimes. The idea behind runtimes is that many desktop applications use a deep library stack, but it is often a similar set of libraries. Therefore, it makes sense to take these common library stacks and distribute them separately as “GNOME runtime” or “KDE runtime”, and have apps declare in their metadata which runtime they need.

It then becomes the responsibility of the flatpak tooling to assemble  the applications filesystem tree with the runtimes filesystem tree when it creates the sandbox environment that the app runs in.

To avoid conflicts, Flatpak requires that the applications filesystem tree is rooted in /app, while runtimes have a traditional /usr tree.

Splitting off runtimes preserves most of the benefits that I outlined for bundles, while greatly reducing code duplication and letting us update libraries independently of applications.

Of course, it also brings back some of the risks of modularity: updating the libraries independently carries, once again, the risk of breaking the applications that use the runtime. So the team maintaining a runtime has to be very careful to avoid introducing problematic changes or incompatibilities.

Going further: extensions

As I said, shipping runtimes separately saves a lot of bandwidth, since the runtime has to be downloaded only once for all the applications that share it. But a runtime is still a pretty massive download, and contains a lot of things that may not be useful most of the time or are just optional.

A good examples for this are translations. It is not uncommon for desktop apps to be translated in 50 locales. But the average user will only ever use a single one of these. In traditional packaging, this is sometimes addressed by breaking translations out as “lang packs” that can be installed separately.

Another example is debug information. You don’t need symbols and other debug information unless you encounter a crash and want to submit a meaningful stacktrace. In traditional packaging, this is addressed by splitting off “debuginfo” packages that can be installed when needed.

Flatpak provides a mechanism  to address these use cases.  Runtimes (and applications too) can declare extension points, which are designated locations in their filesystem tree where additional runtimes can be mounted. These additional runtimes are called extensions. When constructing a sandbox for running an app, flatpak tooling will look for matching extensions and mount them at the right place.

Flatpak is not a generic solution, but tailored towards the use case of desktop applications, and it tries to do the the right thing out of the box: flatpak-builder automatically breaks out .Locale and .Debug extensions when building apps or runtimes, and when installing things, flatpak installs the matching .Locale extension. But it goes beyond that and only installs the subset of it that is relevant for the current locale, thereby recreating the space-saving effect of lang packs.

Extensions: infinite variations

The extension mechanism is flexible enough to cover not just locales and debuginfo, but all sorts of other optional components that applications might need. To give just some examples:

  • OpenGL drivers that match the GPU
  • Other hardware-specific APIs like vaaapi
  • Media codecs
  • Widget themes

All of these can be provided as extensions. Flatpak has the smarts built-in to know whether a given OpenGL driver extension matches the hardware or whether a given theme extension matches the current desktop theme, and it will automatically install and use matching extensions.

At last: the host OS

The examples in the previous paragraph are realized as extensions because the shared objects or theme components need to match the runtime they are used with.

But some things just don’t change very much over time, and don’t need exact matching against the runtime to be used by applications. Examples in this category are fonts, icons or certificates.

Flatpak makes these components from the host OS available in the sandbox, by mounting them below /run/host/ in the sandbox, and appending /run/host/share to the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable.

Summary

Flatpak does a lot of hard work behind the scenes to ensure that the apps it runs find an environment that looks similar to a traditional Linux desktop, by combining the application, its runtime, optional extensions and host components.

The Flatpak documentation provides more information about working with Flatpak as an application developer.