Flapjack Helps Developers Work On Components Inside Flatpak

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 17 January 2018 at 05:09 PM EST. 5 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Endless OS developer Philip Chimento has developed Flapjack as a means of helping developers work on Flatpak.

Endless OS has been one of the big early adopters of the Flatpak app sandboxing tech to the extent that it's an immutable operating system image with OSTree atomic updates and all applications are sandboxed and can only be Flatpaks.

In encountering the pain of working on developer libraries/components within Flatpaks, he's been working on Flapjack over several months as a tool to wrap around Flatpak-Builder and make it easier to develop libraries living within a Flatpak runtime.

Flapjack just depends on Flatpak-Builder, Git, and Python. In the future he's open to a port of Flapjack to BuildStream rather than the slower Flatpak-Builder, but for now that's how development worked out for his needs.
Flapjack is a tool that lets you hack on one or more of the components inside a flatpak runtime. You can make changes to the components and build a new "development SDK" with your changed components. You can then test your flatpak apps by running them against the development SDK.

Those interested in Flatpak and wanting to learn more about this new Flapjack Python tool, see more on Chimento's blog. The code to Flapjack with more technical information is available via GitHub.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week