The developers of tools for assembling self-sufficient Flatpak packages announced the allocation of 508 thousand euros by the STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) fund to finance the development and development of the project until the end of 2027. The funds are planned to be spent on eliminating platform limitations, creating new XDG portals for interacting with the external environment and modernizing the infrastructure.
Among the new features planned for implementation are:
- A mechanism for separating access to sockets, adding rules to WirePlumber to control access to devices, and creating an XDG portal for configuring access rights for audio. The functionality being developed will separate the rights to record and playback audio, which will make it possible to provide access to loudspeakers without access to the microphone.
- A system of granular network isolation of the application from the host environment, allowing access control at the level of network ports and the use of abstractions, such as host, local network and wide area network.
- XDG portal for VPN, allowing third-party VPN applications to manage network connections at the entire level systems.
- XDG portal for spell checking, making it possible to use one common dictionary in all applications in the system, including programs running in isolated environments.
- XDG portal for automatically filling passwords, solving problems with unsafe use of the service NativeMessaging.
- A system that allows applications to declare the need for access to certain portals (for example, a program may require access to an external screen reader) to facilitate the review of projects in application catalogs.
- An abstract system for declaring the services provided by applications.
- Porting portals to the library libdex, adding integration tests and improving permissions request dialogs.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.