[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#885976: flatpak: fails to run on symlinked path locations

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 01 Jan 2018 at 10:51:13 +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> It seems flatpak has very fragile path assumptions. I have a basic setup
> with 2 HDDs, where in I have my /var/tmp/ as a symlink pointing to a
> secondary location. This shouldn't be tagged an unusual setup.

I would recommend preferring bind-mounts over symlinks when redirecting
paths that are significant to the OS to some other drive. Flatpak is not
the only tool that benefits from this: anything that uses a rearranged
view of the filesystem (mostly container technologies) will be simpler
and more reliable if it can rely on directories being directories.

> bwrap: Can't make symlink at /var/tmp: File exists

This is trying to create a symlink as the sandbox's /var/tmp, not in
your real system's filesystem namespace; but Flatpak always creates a
/var/tmp directory anyway, so that symlink creation fails.

What's in ~/.local/share/flatpak/app/${app_id}/current/active/metadata
or /var/lib/flatpak/app/${app_id}/current/active/metadata for the app
in question?

    smcv