Flatpak and LaTeX

[Sébastien Wilmet]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 09:14:21AM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > But the whole TeX Live distribution is quite huge to bundle.
> 
> Does it actually need the whole TeX live distribution though?

There are hundreds of LaTeX packages (if not thousands), with different
engines. LaTeXila has a flexible build tools system, any command can be
executed. A user must be able to install a missing thing from TeX Live.

> 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. 

Not false.

> > 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.

And the host directory may not be at the same place on every system.

> 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.

If the LaTeX applications are on different repos, the user would need to
download several times the TeX Live build, no? Deduplication works only
inside the same ostree repo AFAIK. So there could be a LaTeX repo with
TeX Live and LaTeX apps.

--
Sébastien