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Approve my Flatpak package? #2992

@LinuxSBC

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@LinuxSBC

I've written a Flatpak package for Praat. Would you be willing to make it officially supported, or at least permit me to submit it to Flathub as unofficial? I'm happy to be the one maintaining it, so there won't be additional burden on you.

If you don't know, Flatpak is a Linux packaging format that is sandboxed, making it more secure, and which runs on every Linux distro.

This package is desirable because Flathub is becoming the primary means for app distribution in modern Linux. Considering how useful Praat is for linguists, I want to make it more easily accessible, and Flatpak is the best approach for that.

The manifest is here (until I submit it to Flathub), and I've attached the package so you can test it if you want without building it yourself. Currently, it relies on my fork of Praat with #2991 applied, since I didn't want to circumvent the sandbox unnecessarily, but I'll need to change that before I submit it.

Before I submit, I'll need these:

  • Switch GTK to use native file chooser #2991 applied, so the filepicker works—I can patch the app if I need to, but I'd rather not
  • Your approval, and optionally your Flathub verification—I'm happy to help with that
  • It would be nice to have a screenshot or two in an official Praat page or in the repo that could be pulled, but I can just continue with screenshots in the Flatpak repo if you'd prefer not.

Limitations/differences I've noticed, in descending order of importance:

  • The sandbox means that scripts which depend on other files nearby don't work. The script itself opens and runs, but since the sandbox only sees files you've specifically granted it permission to see, it won't recognize nearby files. For this reason, the runAllTests.praat script doesn't work by default, though it runs fine when I manually bypass the sandbox. I can't think of any way to resolve this without relatively major changes, like selecting a scripts folder rather than a single script, or bypassing the sandbox altogether.
  • The printing command needs to be manually changed to lpr when used the first time, and I haven't tested it—LPR is really old, and I'll probably want to switch it to GtkPrintOperation eventually, but this is fine for now.
  • File paths don't look the same. The title bar will say things like "/run/user/1000/doc/a7853b8d/notebook.praatnb" instead of the actual location. This can be fixed—I'm pretty sure the information is returned by the GTK file chooser—but that's a lot of work for very little gain.
  • Logfile locations need to be manually set when used the first time. This isn't a big deal and often needs to be done when not in a Flatpak anyway.

Flatpak file (compressed so Github accepts it):
org.praat.Praat.zip

Screenshot of how this looks in GNOME Software (ignore the icon, that will be the normal Praat icon):
Image

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