Flatpak and LaTeX

[Alexander Larsson]

On ons, 2016-06-22 at 08:00 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm trying to create a Flatpak for LaTeXila, a LaTeX editor. You can
> find a JSon manifest file on this branch:
> https://git.gnome.org/browse/latexila/log/?h=wip/flatpak
> 
> The application runs fine, except for compiling documents. LaTeXila
> launches a GSubprocess with a LaTeX command. But LaTeX is not
> installed
> inside the sandbox, so the command fails.
> 
> But the whole TeX Live distribution is quite huge to bundle.

Does it actually need the whole TeX live distribution though?

> How can it be handled with Flatpak?
> 
> LaTeXila uses the GNOME runtime. But an application can depend on
> only
> one runtime. So the only solution that I see is that the host OS must
> provide TeX Live (usually just a subset of it), with a portal. But it
> would need to adapt the LaTeXila implementation to use the portal
> instead of GSubprocess.

Portals are about host integration, not about reimplementing
dependencies. What use would a bundled application be if it required a
specific version of latex to be installed and separately maintained on
the outside. 

> Or is there a concept of volume, like Docker has?

You can give the app access to a host directory, but there is no
guarantee that e.g. the host latex is built against e.g. a compatible
libjpeg or libstdc++ to the one in the app runtime, so it can easily
crash when you run it in the sandbox.

What would be nice is if someone came up with a build of latex for e.g.
the freedesktop runtime. Then every app that uses latex could just
bundle that, and by virtue of ostree deduplication every app would
share this, being essentially as efficient as if it was in the runtime,
but not requiring everyone to download it.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
He's an ungodly soccer-playing card sharp with a robot buddy named 
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