I think that flatpak isolation is great and I'm glad it isolates apps from each other. Of course there is a side effect of having to start over from scratch on app configuration.
Does #flatpak publish metadata about location of configuration such that installing a flatpak could give an option of moving application configuration (say, from ~/.config or just ~/.somedotfile) into flatpak config, possibly leaving a symlink in place in order to share configuration with native versions of apps?
@sonny I don't think that individual apps can "figure that out" because by design they can't reach outside the sandbox.
And there are plenty of apps where it's fine to share configuration between versions, but even without that, human muscle memory is a reason to at least have an option of a symlink. ☺
@sonny The point of moving the config is to not to need a file system permission, right?
The whole point of my suggestion is to not need to document what someone needs to do for every single app. They can do that already.
We have computers to move data around for us; looking for documentation for something that could be trivially declared and implemented once seems like a lot of effort redundant human effort.
The browser wars have at least given us this for browser migration as best they can. One click "do what I mean".
Say I have been using an RPM of a browser (firefox, chrome, I don't care), and I want to switch to flatpak.
It would be great if when installing the flatpak, it knows where that browser's config comes from and offers to copy my existing configuration into the new, sandboxed, location, so that I'm not starting over from scratch.
(Additionally, it would be nice to have an option for a symlink to help those of us who know the old location.)
Add comment