Making an app command available to other apps

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Hi,

I have recently prepared a Flatpak app for the Julia language [1]. It
was relatively simple, and it works well (Julia provides a .desktop
file which runs the julia executable in a terminal).

Then I realized things are more complicated when it comes to making
Julia available to other Flatpak apps. In particular, Atom and VSCode
plug-ins are quite popular. They need to be able to run the julia
executable. This is possible via an extension point, which has just
been added to the Atom app [2]. Thanks to this extension I can make an
io.atom.Atom.Extension.julia app which provides Julia to Atom.

But this approach is problematic: there needs to be one app for each
IDE where a Julia plug-in exists, plus one app for the vanilla Julia.
Users need to install the specific app for their IDE, and it won't give
them access to the vanilla Julia, which can be useful. Worse, if they
install several Julia Flatpak apps, the settings will not be shared
(and in particular they will have to reinstall packages manually).

So I was wondering whether this kind of scenario has been considered.
Maybe I just missed something obvious. It looks like it would be
possible to handle it by allowing the Julia app to provide multiple
extensions (one for each IDE).

Thanks for your help!


1: https://julialang.org
2: https://github.com/flathub/io.atom.Atom/issues/8