How to tweak flatpak filter?

azzid · January 27, 2023, 1:50pm

On a fresh install of Fedora 37 and trying to figure out best way to install element.

They link to a flatpak on their homepage which I tried installing via gnome-software:

The error message sounds like I need to tweak the filter. Rooting around the file system I found what I think is the filter - but it clearly says “don’t touch”:

$ head -2 /usr/share/flatpak/fedora-flathub.filter
# Autogenerated, do not edit
# See https://pagure.io/fedora-flathub-filter

Reading on the mentioned url I find instructions to git clone some repo and how to use it to create merge requests for new versions on the filter - but poking at update.py has not changed anything on my system, just in git.

Notably the apps.txt in the git repo after running update.py already seem to mention Element:

[fedora-flathub-filter]$ grep -A5 im.riot.Riot apps.txt 
[im.riot.Riot]
Name: Element
Include:
Comments:
Summary: Create, share, communicate, chat and call securely, and bridge to other apps
Homepage: https://element.io/
Links: https://flathub.org/apps/details/im.riot.Riot https://github.com/flathub/im.riot.Riot
License: Apache-2.0
Runtime: org.freedesktop.Platform/22.08
Downloads (new last month): 6588 (rank: 147)
Fedora Flatpak: no

How do I allow my system to install Element?

dalto · January 27, 2023, 2:42pm

It looks like you could use ./update.py to update the filter.

However, unless you actually want your flatpaks to be limited to a curated list, it is often easier to remove the the filtered flathub remote and add the full flathub remote which won’t be filtered.

azzid · January 27, 2023, 2:50pm

How can update.py tweak my system? Both the documentation and actually running it onyl seem to do changes to the git repo. Presumably to facilitate me tweaking the filter for everyone - which is not what I desire.

I can add the full flathub with:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

and disable the filtered one:

and see the installation start successfully:

But I still didn’t learn how to tweak the filter. Is it supposed to be immutable and common for everyone?