Add flatpak support

[chase9]

This PR aims to add flatpak support to make it easier to distribute and install Yin-Yang.

This PR is currently in WIP status and is not ready to be merged.

[l0drex]

Great idea, I hope this will work out. There might be issues with sandboxing, let's see.

[chase9]

~@l0drex If you're ok with it, I think the scope of this should be to enable easier packaging and not necessarily sand boxing. That will make it easier to implement and will still be a net-benefit to the project since it's easier to distribute!~

Nevermind, I don't think it's necessarily possible to disable the sandbox for an app.

[l0drex]

What we could do (as far as I understand):

• explicitly add every path we want to access with correct read / write permissions
• add access to everything, and add the flatpak prefix to every path (/var/run/host)

I would prefer the first option. It's more work, but doesn't completely disable the sandbox and makes it visible to the users what files we access.

[chase9]

I rebased my branch on the 3.3 beta and have 80% working. I'll need to test and make sure the systemd timers are working correctly, and Firefox is still not working quite right.

[l0drex]

Hey @chase9, are you still working on this? I think it's fine to disable the Firefox plugin in the Flatpak, I can add some logic for that.

[chase9]

Hey @chase9, are you still working on this? I think it's fine to disable the Firefox plugin in the Flatpak, I can add some logic for that.

I fell off after my last update but I would be happy to pick it up again! If you are ok with disabling Firefox in the flatpak for the time being, that should make things easy. FWIW I have been running the flatpak on my main machine for several months now and things appear to be stable.

[chase9]

A couple of notes:

• Notifications aren't working but I don't think it's due to the Flatpak. My system doesn't have notify-send on it. Should we try to find a better way to send notifications? For now I put in an error catch so it doesn't crash the app
• The systemd unit is working but the application doesn't launch when systemd calls it. We'll need to investigate this.

[l0drex]

I guess there is a freedesktop interface via DBUS that we can use for notifications.

For the systemd unit to work, I think we just need to change the command to use flatpak-run. Now, this would break the app outside flatpak. So either we keep the flatpak patches in a different branch or repo, or we just require flatpak and make the native version unsupported. The latter would be my preference (as a developer), since it's less to think about. And flatpak should work on every system. But I can also see that some users wouldn't want to use it...

[chase9]

I personally think it's worth keeping support for installing the application outside of Flatpak so that it continues to stay accessible. I think the solution is easier than I thought since we can run custom commands when building the Flatpak. I'm running a sed command now to replace the executable path for the .desktop and the .service when we build the Flatpak.

I've been trying to get the .desktop file working this morning but I'm having a lot of trouble with this: /usr/bin/python3: No module named yin_yang

I think we might need to add a way to launch the application with just something like yin-yang since flatpak is having trouble resolving modules.

[chase9]

I think what's going on here is that we need to setup this project in such a way where it normally installs itself into the users PATH. Flatpak handles sandboxing, but we still need an entrypoint available to launch.

[chase9]

Note: This now relies on my other PR since it builds off of that.

I'm SUPER happy to report that I have the Flatpak build working! You should be able to test by cloning my branch and running flatpak-builder --install --user build sh.oskar.yin-yang.json --force-clean

The basics are working but it will need some cleanup to make sure that all plugins are seeing profiles. I also noticed that the systemd units are not cleaned up if you remove the Flatpak, but I don't know if we can work around this since there doesn't appear to be an export for .service and .timer files.

[chase9]

Thanks for the review, I'll go through it tomorrow.

FYI in case it's a blocker, I'm unable to get this to run on my M1 Mac. I'm consistantly running into an error with a library:

❯ flatpak run --branch=master --arch=aarch64 --command=runner.sh sh.oskar.yin-yang
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/runpy.py", line 196, in _run_module_as_main
    return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/runpy.py", line 86, in _run_code
    exec(code, run_globals)
  File "/app/lib/python3.10/site-packages/yin_yang/__main__.py", line 9, in <module>
    from PySide6 import QtWidgets
ImportError: libdouble-conversion.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[l0drex]

I just tried to build and run it on my machine, and it works! I used flatpak run sh.oskar.yin-yang though, with your command I get an error that the app is not installed

[chase9]

We may want to write a wiki page with workarounds for using the flatpak. For example, installing Kvantum themes will install them into /usr, which will never be usable with flatpak. When using the flatpak it's recommended to install Kvantum themes into ~/.config/Kvantum/ instead.

[l0drex]

We may want to write a wiki page with workarounds for using the flatpak. For example, installing Kvantum themes will install them into /usr, which will never be usable with flatpak. When using the flatpak it's recommended to install Kvantum themes into ~/.config/Kvantum/ instead.

I think we need this only to see available themes. If we fallback to a simple text input when running from flatpak, we still can allow switching to any theme.

[l0drex]

I'm a bit confused with the flatpak documentation:

As mentioned above the host option does not actually provide complete access to the host filesystem. The main rules are:

• These directories are blacklisted: /lib, /lib32, /lib64, /bin, /sbin, /usr, /boot, /root, /tmp, /etc, /app, /run, /proc, /sys, /dev, /var
• These directories are mounted under /var/run/host: /etc, /usr

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html#filesystem-access

So is /usr blacklisted, or is it mounted under /var/run/host/usr? My guess is the latter.

[chase9]

I'm a bit confused with the flatpak documentation:

As mentioned above the host option does not actually provide complete access to the host filesystem. The main rules are:

• These directories are blacklisted: /lib, /lib32, /lib64, /bin, /sbin, /usr, /boot, /root, /tmp, /etc, /app, /run, /proc, /sys, /dev, /var
• These directories are mounted under /var/run/host: /etc, /usr

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html#filesystem-access

So is /usr blacklisted, or is it mounted under /var/run/host/usr? My guess is the latter.

It looks like it's blacklisted from being included in our sandbox paths, but is mounted under /var/run/host/usr. I added some logic to the Kvantum plugin to look at that path and I was able to use the full set of themes installed on my PC.

[l0drex]

That's great! Now, we should introduce a simple helper function for those system paths (/usr and /etc)

[chase9]

I just rebased the add-flatpak branch on my latest beta branch

[chase9]

Using Poetry in the flatpak build environment is kind of a pain. I'm thinking the best way to go about this would be to have Github CI generate .whl files on release and then we can have the flatpak build script take those. I'll work on that tomorrow.

[chase9]

After many force pushes, the github action for automatically building both a .whl and .flatpak are working! You can download them from the artifacts section of the last build.

I think the final steps are to refactor the action (it takes a bit too long for my tastes), and to make sure any errant issues in the Flatpak version are fixed (I was having trouble getting automatic location working on my system).

[l0drex]

Awesome! Thank you so much for your work, this will help a lot.

Automatic location is a general problem, but a fix is on the way: #285

[chase9]

Of course!Great news about location getting a fix soon. If that’s the case, do you think I should pause additional commits until we can merge this and then work on additional issues/additions in future PRs? I worry about this PR getting too unwieldy.

Chase

Please excuse any grammatical errors as this was sent from my phone.On Apr 19, 2024, at 3:45 PM, Lorenz

Hoffmann @.***> wrote: Awesome! Thank you so much for your work, this will help a lot. Automatic location is a general problem, but a fix is on the way: #285

—Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: @.***>

[l0drex]

Yes, I think that is a good idea.

[chase9]

Hi @l0drex! Are there any other changes you would like to see with this PR? I would love to get this merged, if possible.

[l0drex]

Sorry, I was kind of busy the last days. Tried it out today.

I noticed the Konsole Plugin throws an error (File not found, maybe qdbus is not accessible?). The app doesn't use the native Qt theme because the qt package from pip is used instead of a native one. Not really sure how to solve that. The dark mode of yin Yangs GUI doesn't change even though the rest of the system does, which is kinda funny. I guess this is related to the issue above?

So I am going to take a look at #290, hoping it might solve the Konsole issue. I'll then merge this into a new branch until the theming is sorted out. Later we could try to use CMake like Lutris does, hoping that solves theming issues and might improve the packaging process. I'd like to have a CI to update the flatpak SDK and runtime (in the future).