extra apps and locales

[Robert McQueen]

On 16/02/17 11:56, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-02-16 at 10:31 +0000, Robert McQueen wrote:
>> On 16/02/17 10:16, Robert McQueen wrote:
>>>> 2) Patch the binary. Easy to do if your locale path will be
>>>> shorter
>>>> than Debian's. Pretty sure that could be a 'sed' script.
>>>
>>> /app/extra is longer than /usr - maybe we need /xtr or something?
>>> :P
>>
>> I was looking into the binary patching that would be needed to
>> achieve
>> this, then I realised two things:
>>   - various other prefix-based functionality such as plugins,
>> expected
>> in /usr/lib/... are affected as well as just gettext
>>   - it's not particularly trivial to tell apart the paths in the
>> binaries which are meant to be /usr because they come from the
>> runtime,
>> and which are paths that come from the app so need patching to /xtr
>>
>> 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...
>
> I really don't think that this would be as common a use as you think it
> would be. All the other apps that you listed as examples in your OP
> were relocatable, because proprietary apps usually are, as you don't
> know where they would be installed.

This is a very good point.

> For your case, I'd advise to find a binary version that's relocatable,
> or prod Debian into making those for you. Seeing as this is the way
> Windows reads its data files, it might even be possible in the binaries
> you're using already.

I doubt Debian would be interested in that, we're only using .debs 
because VLC doesn't publish "Linux" binaries. I guess because a) (many) 
distros do, and b) distros make it hard. Maybe they'd be interested in 
Flatpak.

> I'd advise to look into those before looking to patch flatpak to add a
> very fringe feature.

Fair! That's why I started the thread.

> Cheers

Cheers,
Rob

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