[Feature request] Make application as Flatpak package

[kacperpaczos]

In my opinion this app should be relase as flatpak package on flathub.

[TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]

I don't know. There is a main problem with CPU-X: it requires root privileges to work properly:

• libcpuid reads /dev/cpu/N/msr
• dmidecode reads /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/smbios_entry_point or /dev/mem
  So, if you run CPU-X as regular user, some informations will not be retrievable.

I don't think Flatpak allow to use root privileges. I'm reluctant to make a package that cannot show all informations to user.

I don't find any example that run a Flatpak package as root.

[TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]

After some tests, CPU-X Flatpak package can not work as intended due to the sandbox.

List of issues

Issue1: poor eyes

No smooth text, why?

Issue 2: no pkexec

Privilege escalation is complicated, because CPU-X can not communicate with Polkit agent.
A possible workaround is to give CPU-X Flatpak more privileges:

flatpak --user override org.cpux.CPU-X --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak

Then, it allows to use a command like that from CPU-X:

flatpak-spawn --host pkexec --disable-internal-agent /run/host/complicated/path/to/sandbox/through/host/filesystem/cpu-x-daemon

Hooray? No.

Issue 3: no socket sharing with host

The CPU-X daemon listen for requests on /run/cpu-x.sock socket, but /run (and a lot of other paths) are blacklisted inside sandbox, so the core can not communicate with daemon.

Final words

Wireshark (a GTK application with privilege separation, like CPU-X) meets similar problems with the Flatpak sandbox, whereas they have more manpower than CPU-X (see flathub/org.wireshark.Wireshark#4).

As this is not feasible (or unnecessarily too complicated), I prefer to close this issue.
If someone is interested, my manifest file is available as a Gist.

[Evernow]

No reason for this to be released as a flatpak, it's in every major repository and even available as an appimage.

[TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]

Good news everyone. It looks like the community is really interested to have a Flatpak, so it is finally happening: https://flathub.org/fr/apps/io.github.thetumultuousunicornofdarkness.cpu-x
Be able to start the daemon from the Flatpak was not easy, so it why I abandoned this task in the past, sorry.

No reason for this to be released as a flatpak, it's in every major repository and even available as an appimage.

To be honest, I am personally not interested by AppImage/Flatpak/Snap. But I can understand that some people prefer this way to install software on their system rather than relying on repositories with older versions.
Flatpak seems to be a good way of providing software that can be installed on all GNU/Linux distributions (even if the sandbox has a few restrictions).