Batis - XDG-based packaging for Linux desktop apps

[Bastien Nocera]

On Sat, 2015-11-21 at 23:34 +0100, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> On 20 November 2015 at 22:01, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre at mecheye.ne
> t> wrote:
> > Currently, the security model of Linux systems is "distro verifies
> > security and adds to their own repo", with, of course, the step of
> > "user trusts distro".
> > 
> > The security model of Batis seems to be "user trusts application
> > developer"
> > 
> > The security model of xdg-app is "user trusts the sandbox
> > mechanism".
> 
> One thing is to trust the sandboxing and another is to trust the
> application to work in a sandbox reasonably well.
> 
> If I install abiword in a sandbox I cannot edit my word files,
> obviously. I have to give it access to my word files to be of any
> use.
> Which in present day is only accomplished by installing it on my
> desktop machine directly.
> 
> This can be solved to some extent by modification to the GTK library
> so that calling the function that normally pops up file open dialog
> actually calls into the sandboxing framework to import a file into
> the
> sandbox. And depending on the policy the file would be trashed after
> the application terminates, or copied as new version, or updated
> in-place.

This is getting fixed by using "Portals" in xdg-app, and is the reason
why native file choosers are getting implemented in GTK+:
https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/11/05/native-file-choosers-in-gtk/

> This won't work with libreoffice or firefox, unfortunately. They use
> their own file open dialog and not the stock one.

Both are getting ported to GTK3, so they could use the above work
without much changes.