Hello to everybody,

I was struggeling with permissions and permission system on ubuntu touch for several days. When I found this discussion I decided it would be worth to have the permy software running on my device. After some struggeling with the atom environment and the clickable tool I have now a running permy clone(90% of the original source), which, according to this discussion: would be of interest for other people too.
I tried to upload it to the open store, but it was rejected. The click-review process gave a red flag, because this app will read the apparmor profiles (the intention of this app).
Which way do I have (without excessive environment installation) to make this tool available for a larger group?

I don't know if anybody else has the same feeling, but for my impression we are lacking a good IDE for application development.

My understanding for a good IDE is quite simple:

1. having a handsome editor
2. having selectable programming environments
3. having sufficient feedback from the building process to the error locations
4. having a test environment (not only running tests on the program code but also run the program)
5. having a state of the art debugging tool

These are only a few qualities which I expect, but for my experience there is actually no IDE which can fulfil them. And according to my experience programming can be a nightmare without this complete set of capabilites. So if more programmers shall be encouraged to support ubports, for my impression this is a main topic to resolve

In the past I was using Eclipse and QtCreator for my different projects. Both could fulfil the above topics so far, but for Ubuntu touch this is different.

I haven't checked if there is any plugin in eclipse for Ubuntu touch development. At lease within the community discussion nothing was mentioned.

For QtCreator there is an old development kit referred in the ubports documentation, which is outdated and no longer supported. So programming could be fine, but the issue 2) is outdated. This makes the finalization of the projects hard. The preferred building tool "clickable" is not supported. The framework reference is ending with 14.10! The ubport community is switching to cmake base projects, which is supported formally by the CtCreator, but at a first glance I found major differences in project setup which makes it hard for me to transfer projects from qmake to cmake tool.
I have seen some new repositories in the UBports area with new source files for the QtCreator. If there are some activities running to set up a proper up to date IDE for ubuntu touch with this tool, I will support these activities as much as I can. CtCreator is for me still one of the best IDEs for Qt based applications.

I started to use the ATOM editor and did some trials for app development. After the first trials it looks like a concept similar to Eclipse: based on a highly configurable editor the functionality can be expanded by plugins. I installed several plugins in order to program my application. In the configuration I achieved up to now I could write the code and run clickable for compiling and installing. However, I found several issues which makes coding hard:

• capability 2) is missing. Build-in clickable is preset for 15.05 environment. For the development of apps for 16.04 I have to run the build process outside the editor. Therefore application testing has to be done outside the IDE too.
• There is no feedback from the build error code to the source code (at lease for the QML application I didn't notices anything).
• Finally there is no debug environment. The debug plugin I found is a template which has to be filled in properly. Since the setup of a debugger is always a little bit tricky, this tasks should be done for a standard programming environment to unburden any programmer to do it for himself.

These are my observations and impressions so far, which makes me really sad. So I would like to get some feedback on actual trends and (for me yet ) unknown activities to install a proper IDE for ubuntu touch. If there is actually a mainstream, I would like share it. Otherwise I would like to start the discussion how to establish one. The actual situation is , at lest for me, unsatisfactory.

What I need is a comfortable debugger. Using QtCreator is one topic, the SDK is outdated and without that it's still a very good ide but with limited "comfort". I was trying atom for editing, it's nice but it has to grow up. Together with clickable it's not that bad, but a good debugger is missing. I'm actually trying GammaRay. I have installed the latest version a few days ago and I'm now evaluating the capabilites of this package. I will give some feedback on that if it's helpful.

@doniks : I would stop this discussion here unless we find someone who has a M10 FDH with the lates canonical image in short access. A list of the mountpoints (/etc/mtab) via adb should provide some clarification on this topic. I will not do it, because I would like to get my fireza running, which is still as hard work. In the actual environment I found still a lot of weaknesses and open issues, which I would like to solve step by step. first for myself, hopefully with the help of the community, finally in the hope that I can provide some solutions which will improve some little steps.

So if you know somebody who is familiar with atom add-on packages there will be some interesting tasks to work on.

From my experience it would be more sane to wipe the device before you switch from 15.04 to 16.04. There can be too much old settings or cached data which may impact the behavior of the device. For my M10FHD it was necessary to have the device fully running. But then it's amazing.

I installed the latest available (stable) image on my old S3Neo. It took a long time until everything was working, except the "camera".
To be honest, this must be described in more detail.
First of all, when I switch on the camera it shows a picture and I can switch between front and rear side.
I can make a picture, store it and display it.
I can make a video, at the end it starts indicating the recording but then nothing is stored.
Since I have a running ubuntu touch pad I know the critical situation for the video handling: only a few codecs are installed with limited options.
So I did some comparison and found the following details:
apparmor rights: equal on both devices
access rights : (in saftey and security-> app rights) camera in S3Neo: nothing; camera in tablet: 1
After making the video, a file name was created in the camera folder with file length 0.

So I copied a video which was created on my tablet and tried to play it. The log file says: "codec x_h264 not found".

Is it possible, that the codec is not shipped in the image or that it is blocked by other access restrictions?

What I need is a comfortable debugger. Using QtCreator is one topic, the SDK is outdated and without that it's still a very good ide but with limited "comfort". I was trying atom for editing, it's nice but it has to grow up. Together with clickable it's not that bad, but a good debugger is missing. I'm actually trying GammaRay. I have installed the latest version a few days ago and I'm now evaluating the capabilites of this package. I will give some feedback on that if it's helpful.

Dear @Lakotaubp ,

some comments on your request:

1. there is no functional IDE available for application development. So how should anybody be encouraged to maintains or develop applications?

2. Even if the music app is still not maintained, it is working very well. And if it shall be maintained, it must be in conjunction with the media-hub and mediascanner. It is relying on these packages.

3. Actually I'm digging around in the mediascanner code to get some improvements for the music app. In parallel I try to set up some IDE like environments. But without the proper support at several points it is a hard work.

Since I'm doing this occasionally, it will take some time to progress. I will inform you about some updates.

From my experience it would be more sane to wipe the device before you switch from 15.04 to 16.04. There can be too much old settings or cached data which may impact the behavior of the device. For my M10FHD it was necessary to have the device fully running. But then it's amazing.

@doniks : I would stop this discussion here unless we find someone who has a M10 FDH with the lates canonical image in short access. A list of the mountpoints (/etc/mtab) via adb should provide some clarification on this topic. I will not do it, because I would like to get my fireza running, which is still as hard work. In the actual environment I found still a lot of weaknesses and open issues, which I would like to solve step by step. first for myself, hopefully with the help of the community, finally in the hope that I can provide some solutions which will improve some little steps.

So if you know somebody who is familiar with atom add-on packages there will be some interesting tasks to work on.

Just to make it clear: I'm talking from the original ububtu touch version shipped with the M10 FHD by BQ. This was based on ubuntu 15.10.
And you can bite me to hell, there was an LXC container running, separating the system processes from the user area, where all apps were located (no desktop apps, only apps from the ubuntu store!). It drove me crazy that I couldn't add a network access for my samba network. A lot of mountpoints were installed in order to make the container accessible to the root system, for the network access a bridge was installed, ... All these stuff is missing in the actual image for xenial.

@doniks : which process is not confined? Have a look at the apparmor settings (sudo aa-status). On my M10fhd there are now 43 profiles found in enforcement mode (before r92 it was 62). All running applications so far are in enforcement mode, except LXC!

I launched an issue to the provider of the package for this enhancement yesterday, but there is still no feedback.

In the meantime I checked other packages and found the package "terminal tab". This is providing you a terminal within the atom surface, where you can launch clickable like in a desktop shell. So you need not to change between windows/applications. This may help in the meantime.

Any other supporter is welcome too (and required for my impression). It would be great if we can find a specialist for atom extension packages who is willing to prepare some improved tools for development.

@advocatux : Yes I have seen it, and there are some interesting options still to evaluate. I already tested the log command, which is quite helpful and a first step to see roughly what is going on. It still cannot replace a good debugger.

It's in the open store yet.

And some comments on the confinement/sandbox topic itself.
On my M10 FHD with the original ubuntu image the system was running having an LXC container for all applications. By this approach the system tasks were separated from the user tasks, but unfortunately a very excessive access environment deeded to build up. I was not able to install network access to my home network using samba.

The actual UBport implementation is completely different. On the device the apps are running as normal user apps, only restricted by the rules implemented with apparmor. This is not much different to desktop computers except that on my Desktop computer I have 22 rules while on the touch device I count 64. Without a good UI this can be an easy source of errors .

Docker (in clickable) and LXC (in ubuntu sdk) are used for development purposes only to encapulate the target environment from the development host. Actually I found nothing comparable on the touch device (except a fragment for an LXC android container).

An yes, the most irritating issue is the media hub server. I started to understand the concept, but I'm still at the beginning.

So let me follow up with atom and clickable. Maybe you misunderstood me. It is clear, for code hacking I can use even vi. I need a running ide (integrated development environment), where the emphasis is put on integrated!

So to overcome the "weakness" of the IDE, who can tell me

• how to set up atom to run different frameworks (like clickable -k 16.04 , including the option --desktop for testing) using the build menu entry.

• how to set up atom for debugging the applications.

Furthermore, since I have to provide additional libraries, how must I extend the cmake setting in order to provide additional libraries not provided in the standard image?

Furthermore the docker images have no Qt support for serial devices. The relevant libraries are missing.

So who can clean up these weknesses or help me to do it by myself?

@Pulsar33 : I would not consider this app as a core app yet. For my impression it would be primarily a little support tool for developers to check the proper implementation of the apparmor settings and highlight multiple versions of their apps, or help impacted users to find it out. Since I observe this on my tablet too, I would rise the question for a combined uninstall/install procedure for updates installed via clickable.
One can think about an extension which allows the user to remove (only) right gained for the application (e.g. network access gained for an application without network access from the user), but here some specialties of apparmor has to be taken into account. Removal of access right can only be activated after a restart of the apparmor daemon (root access necessary) or after a reboot of the device. This capability would provide a major benefit to the user and make the for me app a candidate for a core app.