Announce: Flatpak 1.15.6 (development prerelease)

[Simon McVittie]

Available here: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/releases/tag/1.15.6

8eb68189eb4850a34752feb29827cc2cc744c1981b8915e280ec1cf5bc387962 *flatpak-1.15.6.tar.xz

This is a development prerelease for the adventurous, part of the 1.15.x
branch, which will eventually lead to a 1.16.0 stable release. Don't
include this version in stable OS distributions.

Some of the fixes in this release will hopefully be backported to
1.14.x for a 1.14.5 stable release soon.

Dependencies:

 * In distributions that compile Flatpak to use a separate bubblewrap (bwrap)
   executable, version 0.8.0 is now required.

 * Enabling the optional Wayland security context feature requires
   libwayland-client, wayland-scanner >= 1.15 and wayland-protocols >= 1.32.

 * Ubuntu 18.04 is no longer routinely tested. Support for dependency
   versions included in Ubuntu 18.04 should be considered "at risk".

Features:

 * Add --device=input, for access to evdev devices in /dev/input (#5481)

 * Update bundled copy of bubblewrap to version 0.8.0, and rely on its
   features:
     * Improve error message if seccomp is disabled in kernel config
     * Security hardening: set user namespace limit to 0, to prevent creation
       of nested user namespaces in a more robust way (#5084)

 * For subsandboxes started by flatpak-portal, inherit environment
   variables from the `flatpak run` that started the original instance
   rather than from flatpak-portal, fixing behaviour of FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS
   and similar features (#5278)

 * Stop http transfers if a download in progress becomes very slow (#5519)

 * Make it easier to configure extra languages, by picking them up from
   AccountsService if configured there (#5006)

 * Add new flatpak_transaction_add_rebase_and_uninstall() API,
   allowing end-of-life apps to be replaced by their intended replacement
   more reliably (#3991)

 * Create a private Wayland socket with the "security context" extension
   if available, allowing the compositor to identify connections from
   sandboxed apps as belonging to the sandbox (#4920, #5507, #5558)

 * Update libglnx to 2023-08-29
     * Use features of newer GLib versions if available
     * Turn off system-level crash reporting infrastructure during
       some unit tests that involve intentional assertion failures

 * Add anchors to link to sections of flatpak-metadata documentation (#5582)

 * New translations: ka, nl.

Bug fixes:

 * Avoid warnings processing symbolic links with GLib >= 2.77.0, and
   with GLib 2.76.0 (GLib 2.76.1 or later silences these warnings)

 * Bypass page cache for backend requests in revokefs, fixing installation
   errors with libostree 2023.4 (#5452)

 * Show AppStream metadata in `flatpak remote-info` as intended
   (#5523; regression in 1.9.1)

 * Don't let Flatpak apps inherit VK_DRIVER_FILES or VK_ICD_FILENAMES
   from the host system, which would be wrong for the sandbox (#5553)

 * Fix build failure with prereleases of libappstream 0.17.x (#5472)

 * Forward-compatibility with libappstream 1.0 (#5563)

 * Fix installation with Meson if configured with -Dauto_sideloading=true
   (#5495)

 * Fix a memory leak (#5329)

 * Fix compiler warnings (#5362, #5366)

 * Make the tests fail more comprehensibly if a required tool is missing
   (#5020)

 * Clean up `/var/tmp/flatpak-cache-*` directories on boot (#1119)

 * Don't force `GIO_USE_VFS=local` for programs launched via flatpak-spawn
   (#5567)

 * Clarify documentation for D-Bus name ownership (#5582)

 * Translation updates: id, tr, zh_CN
   (#5332, #5565)

Internal changes:

 * Split up large source files into smaller modules, reducing internal
   circular dependencies (#5410, #5411, #5415, #5419, #5416, #5414)

 * Re-synchronize code backported from GLib with the version in GLib
   (#5410)

 * Make the flags used to apply "extra data" clearer (#5466)

 * Use glnx_opendirat() where possible (#5527)

 * CI improvements (#5374, #5381)

-- 
Simon McVittie, Collabora Ltd. / Debian
on behalf of the Flatpak maintainers