[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#835595: [flatpak] Impossible to run the app version from debian reposetory after

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2016 at 13:24:05 +0200, Michael Herold wrote:
> But now I got a
> 
> /usr/bin/gnome-maps -> ../share/gnome-maps/org.gnome.Maps
> 
> symlink.

That's gnome-maps from Debian, not gnome-maps from Flatpak.
gnome-maps from Flatpak will be somewhere below either
/var/lib/flatpak or ~/.local/share/flatpak, depending how you
installed it.

> And I have no idea how to start the debian repo version of Gnome
> Maps.

Run "gnome-maps" in a Terminal or something. Flatpak apps aren't in
$PATH (you'd run "flatpak run org.gnome.Maps" from Terminal).

> Gnome (Software and start menu) only knows about one installed version
> of Gnome Maps.

That's probably because /var/lib/flatpak/exports/applications/ comes
before /usr/share/applications/ in the search path for .desktop files.
The ordinary GNOME menus (and KDE and other environments) use the first
("most important") version they find for each app name; Debian's
gnome-maps and Flatpak's gnome-maps are both called
"org.gnome.Maps.desktop" internally.

This is by design, and is not Flatpak's decision. If you want two
independent versions of a particular app, you need to ask their upstream
developer to install the Flatpak under a different name, perhaps as
"org.gnome.Maps.Nightly.desktop".

> Independent from that, it doesen't sounds like a sane default to me to
> change things in /usr/bin/ and /usr/share/ via flatpak. Shouldn't that be
> something like /opt/ or /usr/local/?

That's what it does (the files are somewhere below /var/lib/flatpak for
system-wide Flatpak installations or ~/.local/share/flatpak for
user-specific). /usr/bin and /usr/share are dpkg's territory and
Flatpak doesn't (can't) modify them.

    S