Texlive installer as a flatpak package

[Jakob Jakobson]

Dear Norbert and Siep,

I get your reasons. I then would propose to the maintainers of the tex 
editors to not bundle the texlive package. Instead they could give a 
short description how to use the binaries of a manual installation that 
have been installed with the netinstaller.


Regards

Jakob



Am 25.10.2020 16:32 schrieb Siep Kroonenberg:
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 05:52:05PM +0200, Jakob Jakobson wrote:
>> Dear texlive developers,
>> 
>> would anyone of you be interested in (co)maintaining a flatpak version 
>> of
>> the texlive installer?
>> The background is that flatpak tries to be a new, 
>> distribution-agnostic
>> package format for linux distribution. Currently there are also some 
>> tex
>> editors packaged as flatpak packages, but at the moment each one of 
>> the
>> brings a full texlive distribution (that I maintain). As this bloats 
>> the
>> editors unnecessarily, I was wondering if we could just package the
>> installer. In the following, the users could use tlmgr to individually
>> install their latex packages, which would reduce the overall 
>> installation
>> size of the respective editors. Additionally, perhaps it would spread 
>> your
>> installer more among your users as the installer and tlmgr could be
>> installed and started by a single click.
> 
> I may be totally wrong about this, but isn't something possible with
> custom sandboxing? E.g. with some snap packages users can request
> access to the Documents folders, and for flatpaks there is
> bubblewrap, about which I know even less. So maybe with the right
> sandboxing options and a suitable location of TL, TL might be
> accessible outright from within the sandbox.
> 
> But, like Norbert, I personally stay away from this stuff.