extra apps and locales

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, 2017-02-16 at 10:31 +0000, Robert McQueen wrote:
> 
> So that leads to my next (this might be terrible) idea which is to
> add 
> support for a read-only overlay mount to bubblewrap, so in the case
> your 
> extra app has been "uprooted" from /usr you can add an invocation to 
> this flatpak to layer /app/extra on top of /usr and nobody is any
> the 
> wiser...

Overlayfs was considered in the flatpak design and explicitly avoided
for several reasons:

* Its not considered safe by the kernel people to expose as mountable
  by unprivileged user namespaces.
* It adds requirements on the kernel version that not everything has.
* Its behaviour is not posix compliant, which often causes trouble 
  (for instance you can't untar files on it).
* Merging layers is problematic if the underlying layer changes over 
  time, which happens in flatpak (but not e.g. in docker). A toplevel
  layer could easily accidentally override an updated file in the lower
  layer.

So, this is not going to happen.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
He's a scrappy dishevelled romance novelist with a robot buddy named 
Sparky. She's a transdimensional hypochondriac Valkyrie who can talk to 
animals. They fight crime!