On 07/19/2016 08:37 PM, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
On 07/19/2016 07:03 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general wrote:
This is a nice and useful project, but I think we could be served better in the short term by having supported firejail profiles for things like Firefox and LibreOffice that are easy to use.
Firejail is a different design with less filesystem isolation. We should have both, even in the long term. The more direct competitor to Firejail is Bubblewrap, not Flatpak/pacpak.
That said, the documentation on Firejail on the wiki seems to contain the most important things. I’m not knowledgable enough about Firejail though. Network namespaces are missing in the wiki instructions. I don’t know if Firejail can restrict D-Bus access. In the past I could launch an unrestricted Nautilus from a Firejail’d Icecat, but apparently that no longer works. I don’t know enough about the advantages/disadvantages over Bubblewrap; apparently there is some disagreement about the scope, e.g. whether how Pulseaudio should be dealt with.
Hello, I have to admit that Flatpak seems not to be a suitable base for a pure sandboxing + filesystem isolation tool. Flatpak is meant to be used with networked repositories but pacpak does not need that. This means unnecessary copying of files into a repository that pacpak does not need anyway. Flatpak also keeps old versions of filesystem trees by default which takes up disk space unnecessarily. Using a proper sandbox for installing and not only running an app is cumbersome. Rather than work around all those issues, it seems more KISS to just build a sandboxed pacman wrapper with Bubblewrap and/or Firejail with added filesystem isolation instead of repurposing Flatpak. pacpak 0.2 is out. This will be the last version of pacpak. Current pacpak supports `pacpak -S Base xterm` – it works the way I described building apps with Flatpak on the Arch wiki – but no other commands have been implemented so far (not even upgrades). On nontrusting machines the keyring causes strange problems too and package integrity cannot be verified. pacpak still is *very* slow on my hard drive and the best way to improve speed seems to be not using Flatpak at all. Further development of pacpak will not target Flatpak but Bubblewrap. I will need a new name for a pacpak without Flatpak (bpac and pacwrap are already taken; maybe bubblepac) but I will continue working on it slowly… Regards, Florian Pelz