Feature Request: Support adding remotes to arbitrary filesystem locations

[Newbytee]

• My proposal does not exist in the PLANNED & NOT PLANNED.md document
• I have not found any other opened issues on the same feature request
• I believe this fits within Warehouse's scope of Flatpak management

Describe the feature idea in detail

When adding a remote, it would be nice to be able to specify where in the filesystem it will install to. This is useful when you want to install Flatpaks to a different storage medium, such as a secondary internal hard drive or an SD card in the case of phones. It may also be useful to be able to "copy" configured remotes to new directories.

[heliguy4599]

This sounds like an amazing idea, but I am unaware of a way to point flatpak installations to a new location. Also sorry for the late reply. Do you know something more about custom install locations?

[Newbytee]

You can read about it here: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/tips-and-tricks.html#adding-a-custom-installation. Sorry, forgot to link that in the initial post. There's no good way to do this from a Flatpak package unfortunately, but it is possible. You have to escape the sandbox using $ flatpak-spawn --host (requires --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak) and then use $ pkexec to elevate privileges. Granted, both of these could fail — former in case the user has denied the required permission, and the later if the user doesn't have the relevant command installed. Still, I think this is the best way to do it.

[Newbytee]

I might try working on this myself btw, just wanted to know what you thought of the idea.

[heliguy4599]

Oh I see. Thank you very much for that info. Also, I make heavy use of flatpak-spawn --host and some use of pkexec already in Warehouse, so those requirements are perfectly fine. And yeah, I think it would be a great feature to have.