Here’s a post about a tool that I’ve developed at work. You might find it useful if you contribute to any desktop platform libraries that are packaged as a Flatpak runtime, such as GNOME or KDE.
Flatpak is a system for delivering desktop applications that was pioneered by the GNOME community. At Endless, we have jumped aboard the Flatpak train. Our product Endless OS is a Linux distribution, but not a traditional one in the sense of being a collection of packages that you install with a package manager; it’s an immutable OS image, with atomic updates delivered through OSTree. Applications are sandboxed-only and Flatpak-only.
Flatpak makes the lives of application developers much easier, who want to get their applications to users without having to care which Linux distribution those users use. It means that as an application developer, I don’t have to fire up three different virtual machines and email five packaging contributors whenever I make a release of my application. (Or, in theory it would work that way if I would stop using deprecated libraries in my application!)
This is what flapjacks are in the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man, and Newfoundland. Known as “granola bars” or “oat bars” elsewhere. By Alistair Young, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5331306
On my work computer I took the leap and now develop everything on an immutable OSTree system just like it would be running in production. I now develop everything inside a Flatpak sandbox. However, while Flatpak works great when packaging some code that already exists, it is a bit lacking in the developer experience.
For app developers, Carlos Soriano has written a tool called flatpak-dev-cli based on a workflow designed by Thibault Saunier of the Pitivi development team. This has proven very useful for developing Flatpak apps.
But a lot of the work I do is not on apps, but on the library stack that is used by apps on Endless OS. In fact, my team’s main product is a Flatpak runtime. I wanted an analogue of flatpak-dev-cli for developing the libraries that live inside a Flatpak runtime.
Flapjack
…while this is what flapjacks are everywhere else in Canada, and in the US. Also known as “pancakes.” By Belathee Photography, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15167594
Flapjack is that tool. It’s a wrapper around Flatpak-builder that is intended to replace JHBuild in the library developer’s toolbox.
For several months I’ve been using it in my day-to-day work, on a system running Endless OS (which has hardly any developer tools installed by default.) It only requires Flatpak-builder, Git, and Python.
In Flapjack’s README I included a walkthrough for reproducing Tristan’s trick from his BuildStream talk at GUADEC 2017 where he built an environment with a modified copy of GTK that showed all the UI labels upside-down.
That walkthrough is pretty much what my day-to-day development workflow looks like now. As an example, a recent bug required me to patch eos-knowledge-lib and xapian-glib at the same time, which are both components of Endless’s Modular Framework runtime. I did approximately this:
flapjack open xapian-glib
flapjack open eos-knowledge-lib
cd checkout/xapian-glib
# ... make changes to code ...
flapjack test xapian-glib
# ... keep changing and repeating until the tests pass!
cd ../eos-knowledge-lib
# ... make more changes to code ...
flapjack test eos-knowledge-lib
# ... keep changing and repeating until the tests pass!
flapjack build
# ... keep changing and repeating until the whole runtime builds!
flapjack run com.endlessm.encyclopedia.en
# run Encyclopedia, which is an app that uses this runtime, to check
# that my fix worked
git checkout -b etc. etc.
# create branches for my work and push them
I also use Flapjack’s “devtools manifest” to conveniently provide developer tools that aren’t present in Endless OS’s base OSTree layer. In Flapjack’s readme I gave an example of adding the jq tool to the devtools manifest, but I also have cppcheck, RR, and a bunch of Python modules that I added with flatpak-pip-generator. Whenever I need to use any of these tools, I just open flapjack shell and they’re available!
Questions you might ask
Why is it called Flapjack?
The working title was jokingly chosen to mess up your muscle memory if you were used to typing flatpak, but it stuck and became the real name. If it does annoy you, you can alias it to fj or something.
Flatpak-builder is old news, why does Flapjack not use BuildStream?
I would like it if that were the case! I suspect that BuildStream would solve my main problem with Flapjack, which is that it is slow. In fact I started out writing Flapjack as a wrapper around BuildStream, instead of Flatpak-builder. But at the time BuildStream just didn’t have enough documentation for me to get my head around it quickly enough. I hear that this is changing and I would welcome a port to BuildStream!
As well, it was not possible to allow --socket=x11 during a build like you can with Flatpak-builder, so I couldn’t get it to run unit tests for modules that depended on GTK.
Why are builds with Flapjack so slow?
The slowest parts are caching each build step (I suspect here is where using BuildStream would help a lot) and exporting the runtime’s debug extension to the local Flatpak repository. For the latter, this used to be even slower, before my colleague Emmanuele Bassi suggested to use a “bare-user” repository. I’m still looking for a way to speed this up. I suspect it should be possible, since for Flapjack builds we would probably never care about the Flatpak repository history.
Can I use Flapjack to develop system components like GNOME Shell?
No. There still isn’t a good developer story for working on system components on an immutable OS! At Endless, the people who work on those components will generally replace their OSTree file system with a mutable one. This isn’t a very good strategy because it means you’re developing on a system that is different from what users are running in production, but I haven’t found any better way so far.
Epilogue
Thanks to my employer Endless for allowing me to reserve some time to write this tool in a way that it would be useful for the wider Flatpak community, rather than just internally.
That’s about it! I hope Flapjack is useful for you. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.
Where to find it
Flapjack’s page on PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flapjack
The code on GitHub: https://github.com/endlessm/flapjack
Report bugs and request features: https://github.com/endlessm/flapjack/issues
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