Help Us Test Evolution

It was not an easy task to make Evolution run nicely as a flatpak, but Milan Crha managed to do it and we’ve been fine-tuning it for the last 3 years. There are still some use cases that don’t fully work in a flatpak, but they don’t affect most users. Evolution has established itself well on Flathub, too. It has accumulated over 130k installs. There are roughly 12-15k “active” installations.

Some time ago I also started building Evolution for the beta channel on Flathub. When there are already development releases of the upcoming version (it will be 3.49.x this cycle), I build those for the beta channel. If they’re not available yet, I push stable releases there right after the upstream release is done, roughly one week before they go to the stable channel.

So the beta channel always provides the latest and greatest. Be it the latest development version, or freshly released stable version, depending on the phase of the development cycle. It really helps us find problems before they hit average users. For example, the latest release – 3.48.2 – introduced an ugly regression that made basically impossible to view some HTML messages. It was identified and patched while the version was still in the beta channel, so it never reached users on stable.

That’s why I’d like to raise awareness of the beta channel with Evolution. If you’re a bit more advanced user who would like to help with testing and you use Evolution from Flathub, consider switching to the beta channel. You wouldn’t switch to something broken. Milan doesn’t let low quality releases out. It’s for rather rare bugs that would be great to identify and fix before they hit everyone, or for early feedback when UX changes are being done.

All you need to do is to add the beta channel:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

And install Evolution from it:

flatpak install flathub-beta org.gnome.Evolution

Of course, there are other ways to get the latest release of Evolution. You can build it from source yourself, or build a flatpak directly from the upstream git repo, but the beta channel on Flathub is the most convenient.

EDIT: I forgot the most important thing: where to report problems. All general issues including problems specific to Flatpak as a distribution format belong to the Evolution issue tracker on GNOME Gitlab. Only problems that are specific to Evolution on Flathub should belong to our Flathub issue tracker on Github. I understand it may be difficult for the user to distinguish between a Flatpak problem in general and a problem specific to Flathub. So if you report the former in our issue tracker on Github, it’s fine, too.

Mozilla makes Firefox Beta available on Flathub

I’m glad to see that Mozilla has made a significant process with offering Firefox as a flatpak. Having Firefox as a flatpak was one of our long-term goals.

Three years ago we started a testing flatpak repo with Firefox Developer Edition and soon after that we added Firefox Nightly. For a long time it was the only source of Firefox for Flatpak out there. The user base grew into thousands, a level our hosting could barely deal with. Lately we haven’t had much time for its maintenance and at least the nightly builds were often broken.

That’s why from the very beginning we worked with Mozilla to make official Firefox builds available as flatpaks. The effort was later on picked up by Endless.

Now it brings first fruits, Mozilla is already shipping Firefox Beta in the beta channel on Flathub. You just need to enable it by installing this file: https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.firefox.flatpakref

I think it may already be useful for Silverblue users who have relied on our testing repo if they didn’t want to use package overlay.

There are still a few things to polish before making the stable Firefox available in the stable channel. One of them is localization files which has always been a difficult thing with Firefox. Mozilla has traditionally provided official localized builds for each language. This is not how localizations are typically handled in Flatpak or even in Linux distro packages.

For Fedora Firefox RPM we had to write a script that on startup automatically loads a particular localization file in the form of an addon. I suppose the official Firefox flatpak will work in a similar way.

Last year we also started providing Firefox flatpak built from Fedora packages. That has been the only stable Firefox for Flatpak around. And even after Mozilla releases their official Firefox for Flatpak, we will stay committed to it because there is demand among Fedora users for Firefox that is verified and built by the Fedora Project and it’s also a requirement for software included in Fedora anyway. So if we want to have Firefox as a default, pre-installed browser e.g. in Silverblue we’ll have to build the flatpak ourselves. It also gives us flexibility to ship crucial fixes and features important to our users faster than upstream (e.g. Firefox in Fedora already runs natively on Wayland by default, not on XWayland like upstream Firefox).

In the future, users will have a choice. They can either stick with the default Firefox provided by us, or switch to the one provided directly by Mozilla in a more convenient and secure way than the current tarballs with binaries are. We will also keep maintaining our testing repo for those who are interested in Nightly and Developer Edition. And we’ll see if there is sufficient interest in it to continue.

 

Get notified of new upstream releases

If you maintain a distribution package, or app bundle, or container image, it’s handy to know when components you use in it have new releases.

There is a really useful service Anitya that resides on release-monitoring.org. It watches almost 20 thousand projects for new releases and notify about them.

I maintain several packages in Fedora and the Fedora Project already makes it really convenient for me. It uses Anitya and opens a new bug against your package every time there is a new upstream release which I close once I update the package. But not every project gives you this service.

I also maintain several apps on Flathub which doesn’t provide such a service (yet). And it’s even more important to know about new upstream releases because besides the apps themselves I also have to maintain their dependencies which are not available in runtimes. Especially Evolution has quite a few of them.

Anitya gives you an API, so you can write your own service that will be checking with Anitya. But I’m a lazy person and why to write something that already exists, right? The Fedora Project has a web app called Fedora Notifications which can send notifications of all sorts of events to your email or IRC. You don’t have to be a Fedora package maintainer or anyhow involved in the Project. All you need is a Fedora account (FAS) to log in.

You pick Email Notifications (or IRC, whichever you prefer), click Create New Filter, then you pick Anything regarding a particular “upstream project” rule, and add projects you want to monitor separated by commas. Then click Add this rule and you’re good to go. This is what my rule for components I maitain in Flathub looks like:

You’ll be getting notifications of new upstream releases to your email and it’s up to you how you’ll act on them. I typically check what kind of release it is, if there are any security or important bug fixes. I try to release those ASAP. Otherwise I plan them for future app releases and test with them beforehand.

I can imagine that there can be a nice automation built on the top of the Anitya API. If it detects a new release, it updates the manifest, triggers a build, and sends you info how it went. Maybe one day 🙂

Why I use Flatpak for 3rd party apps

There are more reasons why to run applications as flatpaks. Someone wants to have the latest versions as soon as possible. For me as a user of Fedora which provides up-to-date versions of apps this is not a big motivation. Someone wants to run apps more securely. Again I usually trust software provided by Fedora and Flatpak sandbox is still not as strictly enforced as it should ideally be.

But where I really prefer using Flatpak to RPM packages are 3rd party applications. I’m usually running development versions of Fedora. Pre-releases on my work machine and Rawhide on my home laptop. They have been pretty stable for me, including applications in Fedora repositories. Unfortunately it’s not the case for 3rd party applications. Their authors usually don’t follow distro development closely and although many of them bundle as much as possible to avoid problems with changing dependencies, things break.

I used to use the Spotify client as a package from Negativo17 repos. But when I upgraded to F27, something broke and it stopped working. I’m pretty sure it was fixed later on after people started reporting it, but I didn’t want to stop using Spotify for the time being and didn’t have time to debug and report the issue. So I switched to Spotify flatpak and it has worked for me ever since.

The problem I had with very early stages of pre-released Fedora and Rawhide is that dependecies of GStreamer plugins in RPMFusion were usually broken. So I ended up without system multimedia codecs. It was often the case for VLC from the same repository, too. Then I switched to VLC and GNOME MPV flatpaks. Problem solved.

The last example is Telegram. Until recently I was using the official version. It’s not even provided as an RPM package. You have to download an archive, unpack its content to your home, run the binary which creates a desktop file… not very elegant in 2018, but once you do it, it just works. Well… until it doesn’t. I upgraded to F28 and Telegram suddenly took a lot of time to start up. It hung on some font config error until it timeouted and finally started. It easily took 1 minute. So I switched to Telegram flatpak as well. Works like a charm.

So what I really appreciate about Flatpak is that the apps don’t rely on the underlying system, so if the system changes e.g. due to upgrade to a newer major version apps don’t break. As I said it’s not such a major issue for distro-provided apps, but it’s certainly an issue for 3rd apps and Flatpak solved it for me.

Flathub Experience: Adding an App

Flathub is a new distribution channel for Linux desktop apps. Truly distro-agnostic, unifying across abundance of Linux distributions. I was planning for a long time to add an application to Flathub and see what the experience is, especially compared to traditional distro packaging (I’m a Fedora packager). And I finally got to it this last week.

In Fedora I maintain PhotoQt, a very fast image viewer with very unorthodox UI. Its developer is very responsive and open to feedback. Already back in 2016 I suggested he provides PhotoQt as a flatpak. He did so and found making a flatpak really easy. However it was in the time before Flathub, so he had to host its own repo.

Last week I was notified about a new release of PhotoQt, so I prepared updates for Fedora and noticed that the Flatpak support became “Coming soon” again. So I was like “hey, let’s get it back and to Flathub”. I picked up the two-year-old flatpak manifest, and started rewriting it to successfully build with the latest Flatpak and meet Flathub requirements.

First I updated dependencies. You add dependencies to the manifest in a pretty elegant way, but what’s really time consuming is getting checksums of official archives. Most projects don’t offer them at all, so you have to download the archive and generate it yourself. And you have to do it with every update of that dependency. I’d love to see some repository of modules. Many apps share the same dependencies, so why to do the same work again and again with every manifest?

Need to bundle the latest LibRaw? Go to the repository and pick the module info for your manifest:

{
"name": "libraw",
"cmake": false,
"builddir": true,
"sources": [ { "type": "archive", "url": "https://www.libraw.org/data/LibRaw-0.18.8.tar.gz", "sha256":"56aca4fd97038923d57d2d17d90aa11d827f1f3d3f1d97e9f5a0d52ff87420e2" } ]
}

And on the top of such a repo you can actually build a really nice tooling. You can let the authors of apps add dependencies simply by picking them from the list and you can generate the starting manifest for them. And you could also check for dependency updates for them. LibRaw has a new version, wanna bundle it, and see how your app builds with it? And the LibRaw module section of your manifest would be replaced by the new one and a build triggered.

Of course such a repo of modules would have to be curated because one could easily sneak in a malicious module. But it would make writing manifests even easier.

Besides updating dependencies I also had to change the required runtime. Back in 2016 KDE only had a testing runtime without any versioning. Flathub now includes KDE runtime 5.10, so I used it. PhotoQt also uses “photoqt” in all file names and Flatpak/Flathub now requires it in the reverse-DNS format: org.qt.photoqt. Fortunately flatpak-builder can rename it for you, you just need to state it in the manifest:

"rename-desktop-file": "photoqt.desktop",
"rename-appdata-file": "photoqt.appdata.xml",
"rename-icon": "photoqt",

Once I was done with the manifest, I looked at the appdata file. PhotoQt has it in a pretty good shape. It was submitted by me when I packaged it for Fedora. But there were still a couple of things missing which are required by Flathub: OASR and release info. So I added it.

I proposed all the changes upstream and at this point PhotoQt was pretty much ready for submitting to Flathub. I never intended to maintain PhotoQt in Flathub myself. There should be a direct line between the app author and users, so apps should be maintained by app authors if possible. I knew that upstream was interested in adding PhotoQt to Flathub, so I contacted the upstream maintainer and asked him whether he wanted to pick it up and go through the Flathub review process himself or whether I should do it and then hand over the maintainership to him. He preferred the former.

The review was pretty quick and it only took 2 days between submitting the app and accepting it to Flathub. There were three minor issues: 1. the reviewer asked if it’s really necessary to give the app access to the whole host, 2. app-id didn’t match the app name in the manifest (case sensitivity), 3. by copy-pasting I added some spaces which broke the appdata file and of course I was too lazy to run validation before submitting it.

And that was it. Now PhotoQt is available in Flathub. I don’t remember how much time exactly it took me to get PhotoQt to Fedora, but I think it was definitely more and also the spec file is more complex than the flatpak manifest although I prefer the format of spec files to json.

Is not your favorite app available in Flathub? Just go ahead, flatpak it, and then talk to upstream, and try to hand the maintainership over to them.

Flathub, Snap, Fedora: what is more up-to-date?

Yesterday I wondered how Flathub and Snap are doing in terms of proving up-to-date applications and how they compare to Fedora, a traditional and quite progressive Linux distribution.

The comparison is not extremely scientific. I picked (pretty much randomly) 16 apps which are in all three sources, looked up the available version and when it was updated. This subset is not very large. Flathub tends to have popular open source applications well known from Linux distributions. Snap lacks many of these, but has quite a few apps outside the traditional Linux desktop world. And at last Fedora doesn’t have many multimedia apps which include patent-protected codecs (VLC, Kdenlive, MPV,…).

To find out the app version and last update date I relied on Github repositories for Flathub, on uApp explorer for Snap, and on Fedora packages app for Fedora (27).

Looking at the table, you can see that the differences are not big. Flathub generally offers the most up-to-date apps having the latest versions of apps in the list except for missing one minor update for Eye of GNOME, it was also usually the first one to offer it.

The results of Fedora are pretty surprising to me. One of the biggest advantages of Flatpak and Snap they claim they have over traditional Linux distributions is that they ship the latest and greatest, but apparently at least in desktop apps Fedora is not behind and offers the latest versions as well (with two exceptions in this list) and often very close behind or sometimes even before the two competitors.

Of course a distribution model like Flatpak still keeps other advantages (and also disadvantages): sandboxing, you can run it on older distributions (e.g. RHEL 7) etc., but if you’re only after the latest versions Flathub and Snap don’t give you a big advantage over Fedora repositories. And if the Fedora Project offers a Flatpak repository built from Fedora packages as we plan, it can actually be a hit because it will be able to offer up-to-date applications and in a much larger number than current Flathub or Snap Store.

App	Flathub	Snap	Fedora
Darktable	2.4.0, Dec 24	2.2.5, Oct 25	2.4.0, Jan 1
Blender	2.79, Sept 26	2.79, Sept 11	2.79, Sept 30
Corebird	1.7.3, Nov 19	1.7.3, Nov 20	1.7.3, Nov 28
GnuCach	2.6.19, Jan 5	2.6.19, Dec 18	2.6.18, Oct 30
Inkscape	0.92.2, Aug 9	0.92.2, Aug 19	0.92.2, Oct 1
LibreOffice	5.4.4, Dec 20	5.4.3.2, Dec 1	5.4.4.2, Dec 19
Nextcloud client	2.3.3, Nov 24	2.3.3, Dec 11	2.3.3, Oct 5
Picard	1.4.2, Sept 27	1.4.2, Oct 7	1.3.2, Jul 14
GNOME Calendar	3.26.2, Oct 5	3.26.0, Sept 22	3.26.2, Oct 11
Evince	3.26.0, Nov 9	3.26.0, Nov 29	3.26.0, Sept 18
Eye of GNOME	3.26.1, Nov 7	3.26.2, Nov 29	3.26.2, Nov 15
gedit	3.22.1, Jul 31	3.22.1, Nov 29	3.22.1, Aug 3
Glade	3.20.2, Dec 15	3.20.0, Nov 29	3.20.2, Dec 10
GNOME Characters	3.26.2, Nov 7	3.26.2, Nov 29	3.26.2, Nov 11
GIMP	2.8.22, Oct 17	2.8.22, Dec 11	2.8.22, Nov 11
HexChat	2.2.14, Apr 12	2.2.14, Feb 5	2.2.14, Dec 12 2016

Fedora Media Writer Available in Flathub

Fedora Media Writer is the tool to create live USB flash drives with Fedora. You can also use dd or GNOME Disks, but Fedora Media Writer is the only graphical tool that is tested with Fedora ISOs (please don’t use UNetbootin and such because they really cause faulty Fedora installations).

Fedora Media Writer is available as an RPM package in Fedora repositories and we provide installation files for Windows and macOS. Those are actually offered to users with Windows and macOS as the default download options at getfedora.org. We’ve provided users of other Linux distributions with a flatpak, but it was hosted in its own repo. Recently we managed to get the flatpak to Flathub which many users have already enabled, so now it’s even easier and faster to install.

We’re Organizing Flatpak Workshop

Several years ago, we organized two workshops focused on packaging software for Fedora. It was a success. Both workshops were full and several participants became package maintainers in Fedora. Packaging for Flatpak is becoming popular lately, so we decided to offer a workshop which is focused on flatpaking apps.