extra apps and locales

[Robert McQueen]

Hi there,

We have a Flatpak for VLC (https://github.com/endlessm/vlc-flatpak/) 
where we're downloading some pre-compiled Linux binaries (for Debian 
jessie, because our runtime is based on that) and unpacking the /usr 
from the .debs into /app/extra.

The app works fine, but doesn't find it's locales - because the binaries 
are compiled assuming prefix is /usr, so it's looking in 
/usr/share/locale for it's .mo files. The gettext command line tool 
accepts a TEXTDOMAINDIR environment variable, but glibc's bindtextdomain 
call doesn't respect this environment variable - it just takes the 
arguments provided which are compiled in to the calling binary.

I think with everything else (Spotify, Skype, Chrome, Dropbox, etc) 
we've packaged to date using Flatpak extra data, we've been lucky that 
they all don't use gettext - but I think this problem will apply to 
everything that uses gettext and isn't built with the /app or /app/extra 
prefix.

In some other cases, we've patched some libraries like GStreamer in the 
Flatpak runtime, to eg have a different search path for plugins, but 
patching glibc (in both the fd.o runtime & also in the Endless OS 
runtime, where a large part is shared with the system's ostree) seems 
like a very large sledgehammer to crack this nut.

If we could do a bind-mount of /app/extra/share/locale to 
/usr/share/locale inside the sandbox at runtime, that would fix this, 
but that's only available in build sandboxes.

Any other ideas?

Cheers,
Rob

P.S. Ironically / unfortunately, our old implementation of so-called 
"external apps" which worked with a GNOME Software ran outside of 
flatpak and download the .deb (or whatever) files and checked them in to 
a local repo as flatpak runtime extensions, so the /usr prefix was 
preserved and we wouldn't have had this issue. But we just ripped all 
that out... d'oh...

........................................................................

Robert McQueen  |  +1.415.413.4159  |  Endless <http://endlessm.com/>