Package: flatpak-xdg-utils (1.0.1-2)

xdg-open and xdg-email reimplementation for containerized apps

Applications running in a Flatpak sandbox cannot normally launch arbitrary subprocesses outside the container to open files and URLs. This package provides reimplementations of the standard xdg-open(1) and xdg-email(1) command-line tools intended to be run inside the container. They use the D-Bus session bus to communicate with the xdg-desktop-portal service outside the container.

To avoid conflicting with the standard xdg-utils package, these tools are installed in /usr/libexec/flatpak-xdg-utils. This directory can be added to the PATH when preparing a container, or used as a target for container-specific symbolic links in /usr/bin.

This package also contains flatpak-spawn, which can be used by Flatpak applications to launch processes outside the container. Unprivileged applications can use this mechanism to launch a helper tool such as a thumbnailer in a version of their sandbox with more restrictive permissions, and specially-privileged applications with the 'devel' flag (such as GNOME Builder) can use this mechanism to bypass the sandbox and run commands on the host system.

This package is normally only useful if you are using Debian packages to construct a Flatpak runtime or a similar container, and should not be installed on a normal Debian desktop system. On desktop systems please install the reference implementation of the xdg-open and xdg-email tools, which can be found in the xdg-utils package.

If this package is installed in a non-Flatpak environment for testing, it will require the dbus-session-bus and xdg-desktop-portal packages (which would not be useful to install in a container).