It’s a question I had to ask myself multiple times over the last few months. Depending on the context the answer can be: very simple, just call the standard library function extremely hard, don’t trust anything If you are an app developer,
I published three Rust crates: name-to-handle-at: Safe, low-level Rust bindings for Linux name_to_handle_at and open_by_handle_at system calls pidfd-util: Safe Rust wrapper for Linux process file descriptors (pidfd) listen-fds: A Rust libra…
The Wayland core protocol has described surface state updates the same way since the beginning: requests modify pending state, commits either apply that state immediately or cache it into the parent for synchronized subsurfaces. Compositors…
The Wayland core protocol has described surface state updates the same way since the beginning: requests modify pending state, commits either apply that state immediately or cache it into the parent for synchronized subsurfaces. Compositors…
For all the rightful criticisms that C gets, GLib does manage to alleviate at least some of it. If we can’t use a better language, we should at least make use of all the tools we have in C with GLib. This post looks at the topic of ownershi…
Graphics drivers in Flatpak have been a bit of a pain point. The drivers have to be built against the runtime to work in the runtime. This usually isn’t much of an issue but it breaks down in two cases: The first issue is what the proprieta…
Together with my then-colleague Kalev Lember, I recently added support for pre-installing Flatpak applications. It sounds fancy, but it is conceptually very simple: Flatpak reads configuration files from several directories to determine whi…
Yesterday I released Flatpak 1.17.0. It is the first version of the unstable 1.17 series and the first release in 6 months. There are a few things which didn’t make it for this release, which is why I’m planning to do another unstable relea…
A while ago I wrote about the limited usefulness of SO_PEERPIDFD. for authenticating sandboxed applications. The core problem was simple: while pidfds gave us a race-free way to identify a process, we still had no standardized way to figure…
Andy Holmes wrote an excellent overview of XDG Intents in his “Best Intentions” blog post, covering the foundational concepts and early proposals. Unfortunately, due to GNOME Foundation issues, this work never fully materialized. As I have
Writing asynchronous code in C has always been a challenge. Traditional callback-based approaches, including GLib’s async/finish pattern, often lead to the so-called callback hell that’s difficult to read and maintain. The libdex library of…
At the Linux App Summit (LAS) in Albania three months ago, I gave a talk about testing in the xdg-desktop-portal project. There is a recording of the presentation, and the slides are available as well. To give a quick summary of the work I