Recommend that Flatpak apps use a custom Tracker domain
There are at least 2 apps released as Flatpaks which use Tracker, Gnome Music and Gnome Photos. Currently these connect to the org.freedesktop.Tracker.* D-Bus names from the host. This has a number of problems:
- The Tracker store on the host may contain data which the user doesn't want to share with code that's running inside the sandbox.
- The host may not have Tracker, or may have a version which has an incompatible version of the D-Bus API.
- The app can't ever benefit from new features in Tracker, unless it invalides the "deploy your app anywhere" premise of Flatpak by mandating that the host OS packages a recent enough version of Tracker
We need to shift to a model where Flatpak apps bundle Tracker and run the Tracker daemons inside the sandbox. This should be possible now if apps follow the steps here: https://developer.gnome.org/libtracker-sparql/unstable/tracker-private-store.html
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We need to test this works with existing apps: see gnome-photos#111 and do the same for gnome-music
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We need to ensure the documentation is clear on how to do this.
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We need to communicate the change to tracker-list and flatpak-list mailing lists
Edited by Sam Thursfield