Allow for applications that have absolute paths compiled in to run.

AppImageCrafters / AppRun

AppDir runtime components

MIT License

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Allow for applications that have absolute paths compiled in to run. #8

Closed azubieta closed 4 years ago

azubieta commented 4 years ago

Investigate https://github.com/project-portable/libunionpreload in order to port it's features into libapprun_hooks

probonopd commented 4 years ago

Since this adds some overhead (I think) it should be made an optional feature.

azubieta commented 4 years ago

Some overhead will be added, but I expect it to be quite insignificant. It will be an extra function call on file opening operations. There is no overhead on RW operations being those the more expensive. Me first call would be to keep the whole code together and perform tests. Then we can take a decision based on solid data.

azubieta commented 4 years ago

To allow an application with fixed paths we must intercept all the system calls that take a file path as argument and rewrite. libunionfs does this job quite well so we are going to copy this feature.

Two kind of overlay will be required:

full overlay (no fallback to the root fs): this is required to avoid a given application to load non-compatible binaries from the system
soft overlay, allows fallback to the system files. This is used in scenarios where the system files can be safely opened by the app, by example with icons.

azubieta commented 4 years ago

Changes merge to master preparing 1.2 release

New feature: Path mappings support APPRUN_PATH_MAPPINGS: /home/runner/work/Glimpse/Glimpse/glimpse-prefix/:usr/;

probonopd commented 4 years ago

Very useful @azubieta. Will it be documented at https://github.com/AppImageCrafters/AppRun/blob/master/README.md?