GUADEC 2020 and Flatseal 1.6.1

GUADEC 2020

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to share my experiences Flooding the desktop with learning tools, with the wider GNOME community at GUADEC Even though the event went online for the first time, due to COVID-19, it went pretty smooth!

The event was full of great talks, including many from former colleagues, Archaeology of Accessibility by @ebassi, Parental controls in GNOME by @pwithnall, What’s new with JavaScript in GNOME by @ptomato, Communication Hacks by @1nuritzi and many, many others.

The social hours were hilarious and was great to see so many familiar faces. I am really hoping that, whenever we go back to physical events, we can still keep this online experience for those unable to assist.

Flatseal 1.6.1

Since the previous release, I have been slowly making improvements and have finally collected enough of these for a new release.

What’s new?

I started with a second pass on the big refactor I made for 1.6.0. I finally got rid of some “evolutionary” leftovers, and made all the individual permissions models even more self-contained. Again, this makes things much easier to extend and maintain.

Before I move on to the user-visible work, a few words about this project. Flatseal uses overrides as its backend to modify permissions, but it’s really more than just a graphical version of flatpak-override command-line tool. What I am (at least) trying to do with this project is to provide an improved experience for how Flatpak users interact with their applications permissions.

The most noticeable change in this release happens to be a good example of that.

This release adds support for session-bus and system-bus overrides. Users can remove, add or modify existing bus names. Thanks to @digitalethics for requesting this feature.

Being able to modify an existing bus name without having to explicitly think in terms of removing an existing name and adding a new one, seems trivial, but it’s quite an improved experienced already. The model is “smart” enough to detect these changes and translate these properly to one or more overrides. Like this, every switch and text entry in Flatseal went through these kind of considerations.

This release also adds other minor changes, including a fix for cases where applications icons were missing (e.g. for LibreOffice), a small change in the permissions groups labels to match even closer the terms used in flatpak-run and flatpak-override (e.g. “allow” instead of “features“), a fix that prevents Flatseal from crashing when multiple versions of libhandy are available (e.g. when running non-flatpak versions of Flatseal) by @fushinari , among other even minor fixes.

What’s next?

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, my short term goal was to keep adding support for more overrides. Now that Flatseal has almost reached feature-parity with flatpak-override, and that the model representation is way more readable, I will start to reach out to some people from the community to see if they would be interested in seeing Flatseal model moved into a separate library. Help will be welcome!

Last but never least, special thanks to @eson57, @AsciiWolf, @ovari@cho2 , @Vistaus and others for keeping Flatseal translations up to date.

Author: Martín Abente Lahaye

I am an experienced Software Engineer, an open source contributor, a member of the GNOME Foundation and Sugar Labs.

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