Geary 0.11.1 flatpak (version 2)

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 2016-06-29 at 11:53 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> On 29 June 2016 at 11:10, Mattias Eriksson <snaggen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was told that the geary flatpak i had issues with the About
> > dialog image,
> > missing locales and help not working. I have fixed the image and
> > locale
> > problems, but I'm not sure how to fix the problem with the Help not
> > working?
> 
> In order to launch the help browser you need a portal — you cannot
> see
> all the installed applications from within the sandbox, so there's
> nothing with which you can open the help URI. The "launch application
> appropriate for this URI" portal is in progress; as soon as it's
> available, help links should go back to working.

Actually help is pretty complicated, for several reasons.

First of all, even with the open-uri portal its not going to
automatically work, because the help pages are in /app which is not
where the helper will see it. 

Its technically possible to see where /app comes from, by looking at
the flatpak-info file:

 sh-4.3$ grep app-path /run/user/1000/flatpak-info 
 app-path=/home/alex/.local/share/flatpak/app/org.gnome.iagno/x86_64/stable/29045f65d3486cc8d860625baa93490d0cf115b2e153b6259a46595d1e70fdf2/files

You can use this to create a host side pathname.

However, there are other issues:

* It relies on the gnome help system being on the host, which may not
be true, i.e. on a kde install. Or be outdated, not supporting your
help files.

* Help can contain references to other applications. This is
problematic if those apps are sandboxed, as we can't access those help
files.

Maybe we should just bundle the help browser with the gnome runtime?
That will conflict with the cross-app help references though...