Re: Any interest in making Emacs available on Flathub?

[Joonas Sarajärvi]

2018-04-19 9:10 GMT+03:00 Richard Stallman <address@hidden>:
>   > I would like to have GNU Emacs available in the Flatpak [1] format.
>
> We need to think about whether it raises any ethical issues.
>
> What systems can a Flatpak package run on?
A flatpak package runs on any GNU/Linux system that has the flatpak
tool installed.

As earlier there was a similar discussion about Docker, I'll mention
that this works very similarly to how a Docker container is expected
to run on any GNU/Linux system that has the Docker tools.

> What software is needed to make a Flatpak?  Is any of it nonfree?
The low-level details of packing things up are included in the flatpak
tool and typically also the flatpak-builder tool is used. As far as I
know, both are free software licensed under LGPL 2.1.

> What software is needed to run one?  Is any of it nonfree?
Required is the flatpak tool, which to my knowledge is free software
under LGPL 2.1.

As far as I know, these tools are currently only able to run on GNU
systems that use Linux as the kernel.

Then in addition to flatpak and flatpak-builder, the application wlil
usually get built against a runtime which is basically a tree of files
that looks like a GNU/Linux system except that it lacks the kernel.
Also when the application is run, it is placed into a mount namespace
that sees this runtime in the /usr directory. Flatpak does not require
any specific runtime to be used and each application can choose a
different one as needed, but there are a few popular ones. The flatpak
that I wrote for Emacs uses the org.freedesktop.Sdk runtime which to
my knowledge is entirely free software. It includes a fairly large
collection of libraries and also e.g. GCC and git and other tools.

As far as I know, the Emacs flatpak that I wrote does not require
proprietary software to be built or used.