Research Notes

Few ongoing research activities with no particular timelines, unless some of the topics contribute to a release.

Local release pipeline improvements

Need to see if it's possible to fully bootstrap builds inside podman, especially the Live CD build process.

Flatpak

Overview

Following the Building your first Flatpak guide

• Install dependencies (flatpak and flatpak-builder with dnf on Fedora)
• Create a YAML manifest (maybe switch to JSON instead, are there tooling limitations for YAML?)
• Produce the main binaries of the application
• Build the application with flatpak-builder
• Test the build with flatpak run

Required Flatpak sources

• The GUI application (entrusted-gui program as regular application, instead of the AppImage)
• The sanitizer program running inside container solutions (entrusted-container)
• A subset of LibreOffice to convert Office documents to PDF
• A subset of Tesseract for searchable PDF results

Current Questions

• How to bundle a subset of LibreOffice?
• How to bundle a subset of Tesseract?
• How do we ensure that entrusted-container is linked against the proper LibreOffice and Tesseract libraries?
  • Are we forced to build entrusted-container as part of the Flatpak installation?
  • Or can we compile ahead of time entrusted-container and copy its container dependencies to a tar file and then extract it inside the Flatpak??