[sword-devel] Fwd: Packaging Ezra Bible App for Snap and Flatpak users?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

Gah, once again I have failed to send my response to everyone.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Aaron Rainbolt <arraybolt3 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 1:07 PM
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] Packaging Ezra Bible App for Snap and Flatpak users?
To: Fr Cyrille <fr.cyrille at tiberiade.be>


On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 12:42 PM Fr Cyrille <fr.cyrille at tiberiade.be> wrote:
>
>
>
> Le 20/01/2024 à 19:18, Aaron Rainbolt a écrit :
>
> It appears that the Ezra Bible App can only be installed using
> upstream packages for a select group of popular Linux distributions
> currently. It would be handy for users to be able to install it by
> using widely available repositories such as the Snap Store and
> Flathub. I'm fairly skilled at software packaging for distros (though
> I haven't done Snap or Flatpak before - I'm interested in learning how
> though) and am thinking about trying to make Snap and Flatpak packages
> for Ezra Bible App.
>
> Adding it to debian repo would be nice too. And easier for sharing modules than snap.

Getting it into Debian would be nice, and I actually thought about
doing that initially, but it would be... difficult. Ezra Bible App is
Electron-based. Due to the policies of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and
probably most other distros I would guess, all of a package's
dependencies *have* to be in the distribution's repos in order for
software that uses those dependencies to be accepted into the repos.
Electron isn't packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora. That means in
order to get an official Debian package for Ezra, I would have to
package **all of Electron.** Electron is based on Chromium, which
takes time and eternity to compile even on hardware much faster than
anything I own, so actually doing that packaging would be hard, and
then on top of it there are potential hurdles with versions and
whatnot - for instance Electron upstream is at version 28.1.4, Ezra is
still using 17.1.0.

Ezra's developers can distribute packages with Ezra and Electron
included because they're able to ignore policies like this - their
builders can have Internet access at build time, can use software
directly from upstream, can take advantage of package managers such as
npm, etc. None of those are available in an official Debian package -
the package has to be able to build without Internet access, use only
distro-internal dependencies, etc. So... yeah, it would be a **lot**
of work. And then I would be the maintainer of Electron in Debian,
which is probably a monumental task, one I almost certainly don't have
time for.

On the other hand, I know there are Electron apps packaged as Flatpaks
and Snaps (namely Element, but also others). If I understand
correctly, Snap and Flatpak packages have significantly more lenient
requirements, which makes packaging much easier for those platforms.
Then there would be Ezra packages not only for Debian, Fedora, and
derivatives, but also for Arch, Gentoo, RHEL, NixOS, etc., etc. That
seems like it would take significantly less time to do and would
potentially have a better impact.

> Does this seem like a good idea? Are there hurdles I should be aware
> of (other than having to work with Electron)? Would the developers
> prefer that I not do this?
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