Bug#919299: ITP: flatpak-xdg-utils -- xdg-open and xdg-email reimplementation for containerized apps

[Simon McVittie]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org>

* Package name    : flatpak-xdg-utils
  Version         : 0.1+ (git snapshot)
  Upstream Author : Florian Müllner, Matthias Clasen, Alex Larsson
* URL             : https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-xdg-utils
* License         : LGPL-2+
  Programming Lang: C
  Description     : xdg-open and xdg-email reimplementation for containerized apps

Applications running in a Flatpak sandbox cannot normally launch arbitrary
subprocesses outside the container to open files and URLs. This
package provides reimplementations of the standard xdg-open(1) and
xdg-email(1) command-line tools intended to be run inside the container.
They use the D-Bus session bus to communicate with the xdg-desktop-portal
service outside the container.

These tools are developed alongside Flatpak, but they are not completely
Flatpak-specific, and might also be useful for other app-container
technologies.

This package is normally only useful if you are using Debian packages
to construct a Flatpak runtime, and should not be installed on a normal
Debian desktop system. On desktop systems please install the reference
implementation of the xdg-open and xdg-email tools, which can be found
in the xdg-utils package.

If this package is installed in a non-Flatpak environment for testing,
it will not work without the dbus-session-bus and xdg-desktop-portal
packages.

[X-Debbugs-Cc to xdg-utils maintainers for information: this will
probably have Conflicts/Replaces, and possibly Provides, on the reference
implementation of xdg-utils.]

---

This will probably also produce a second binary package, flatpak-spawn
or similar, with the parts that are completely Flatpak-specific:

Package: flatpak-spawn
Description: tool to run programs outside a Flatpak sandbox
 Applications running in a Flatpak sandbox cannot normally run arbitrary
 commands outside the container, and cannot create nested containers.
 The flatpak-spawn tool uses the D-Bus session bus to communicate with
 a portal service provided by Flatpak outside the container, which can run
 commands on behalf of the sandboxed application, subject to Flatpak
 permissions checks.
 .
 Applications that contain a helper tool such as a thumbnailer can use
 flatpak-spawn to launch that tool in a new instance of their own
 sandbox, with more restrictive permissions. For example, this can be
 used to mitigate possible security vulnerabilities in thumbnailers by
 granting fewer privileges to the thumbnailer.
 .
 Trusted applications with the 'devel' privilege flag, such as the GNOME
 Builder integrated development environment, can also use flatpak-spawn
 to run arbitrary commands on the host system, bypassing the sandbox.
 .
 This package is only useful if you are using Debian packages to construct
 a Flatpak runtime, and should not be installed on a normal Debian desktop
 system.