[Plash] Using plash to overlay a filesystem

[Thomas Leonard]

I'm trying to use Plash to implement an overlay (like Klik). Some questions:

Some programs don't like running with a different user ID. e.g.

(gedit:12710): GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown
user id (2092094)

Also, Orbit creates thousands of temporary directories, as it wants
one owned by itself.

I tried disabling the PID change with:

class SameProcessSpec(plash.process.ProcessSpecWithNamespace):
        def _set_up_sandbox_prog(self):
                pass

That works for the process itself, but the process can't spawn any
child processes. Any fix for that? (I'm not trying for security here;
this is for friendly programs)

The union mounts feature looks very useful. Is there a way to access
it from pola-run, or only though the Python API? Is it possible to
have writes go to the lower level? Some packages will probably want to
union onto /, but that shouldn't affect writes to /home, etc.

Thanks,


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard       ROX desktop / Zero Install
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