Re: Any interest in making Emacs available on Flathub?

[Joonas Sarajärvi]

Hi,

Just to let you know, a pre-built copy of GNU Emacs is now available 
from the Flathub service [1]. Instructions for making use of this 
mechanism of distribution are available on that site.

The binaries and their corresponding source code are provided by the 
Flathub organization, based on the git repository at [2]. This git 
repository is currently maintained by me and Zach Oglesby. I think we 
are well resourced to keep Flathub offering a copy of Emacs that is up 
to date and works well, but it would still be great to have someone with 
a longer track record in Emacs development as collaborator.

When this distribution format was discussed earlier, the main concern 
seemed to be about making Emacs accidentally depend on proprietary 
software so I'll quickly address this.

Flatpak packaging tools are free software under LGPL-2.1 and available 
from package repositories of many popular GNU/Linux distributions

Emacs flatpak requires the org.freedesktop.Sdk runtime which is 
basically a GNU system compiled for Linux kernel, consisting of popular 
libraries like glibc, gtk+ and tools like the GNU compiler collection. 
The runtime includes a large set of software under various free software 
licenses. It is not yet well documented but based on discussion with its 
maintainers, no proprietary software is intentionally included in it.

Please let us know if there are problems
- Joonas

[1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnu.emacs
[2] https://github.com/flathub/org.gnu.emacs