Re: Call for participation: Fedora Flatpaks

[Martin Kolman <mkolman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2018-09-07 at 05:06 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:

On Fri, Sep 7, 2018 at 2:52 AM, Robin Lee <cheeselee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What does it mean for 'Fedora' Flatpaks?
- Flatpaks that run on a Fedora runtime? Then, what's the benifit to
use Fedora runtime instead of freedesktop ones?
- Flatpaks that maintained by Fedora community? Then, why not
encourage people to contribute to Flathub directly?

What is meant here is "a runtime and Flatpaks built out of the Fedora RPMs on Fedora infrastructure".

That's *very* nice & something I have been calling for basically from day one with flatpacks. 

Not everyone wants to become a release engineer & build all the dependencies of their application by hand, especially when

all this is already available via RPM packages in Fedora. :)

BTW, it is (at least) to me not really apparent from the original email that we (finally!) have the Fedora Flatpak runtimes availble for use.

Some advantages this has over building and using Flatpaks on Flathub:

 - In most cases, it's easier to create a Flatpak from an existing RPM rather than creating a flatpak-builder manifest from scratch.

 - We're able to reuse the Fedora updates infrastructure and automate rebuilding and releasing Flatpaks and the runtime for security or other bug fixes

Is there a listing of what is already part of the Fedora runtime ? I tried cliking about in the linked documentation, but was not able to find it.

Also, how long will the runtimes be supported by security fixes ? I guess just as long as the corresponding Fedora releases, or maybe longer ?

 - Applications with complicated build dependencies are easier to handle. Any RPM in Fedora can be used as a build-time dependency. Only run-time dependencies that aren't already in the runtime need to be rebuilt and bundled, and even there it's a mostly automatic process.

(On the other hand, for an upstream application developer who knows nothing about RPMs and specfiles and so forth, and just wants to create a Flatpak of their application, flatpak-builder and Flathub is likely more attractive than creating a Flatpak via Fedora packaging.)

It's not exclusive - you can use Flatpaks from Flathub and from this effort together - even on a non-Fedora system. And, of course, you can contribute to both Fedora and Flathub!

Do I understand things correctly that Flatpaks built for Fedora should still work fine on other distros such as say Debian, ArchLinux or even CentOS ? I guess the user adds the Fedora generated Flatpak repo,

this pulls in the Fedora runtime (and keeps it updated) and then installs the corresponding Flatpak and all just works seamlessly ?

Owen

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