Flatpak of JabRef

Features
1

It would be nice to have a flatpak of JabRef. The GNOME Software Center as well as Linux Mint Software Manager mintinstall do support flatpaks now.

The flatpak can be uploaded to https://flathub.org/

Reason for this feature is:
The Ubuntus LTS version 16.04 still has JabRef 2.10 in it’s repositories. Having a flatpak version users could install and use the newest JabRef version very easily now and getting updates for JabRef (without having to manually download the latest jar version and create manually a menu entry for the downloaded jar file).

2 Likes
2

Hi,

we currently only offer a snap of JabRef (not the latest dev version yet)

If you have some knowledge about flatpack, feel free to contribute

3

I have written a proof of concept manuscript file. It builds a flatpak but is very rough at the edges. Where should I commit this?

1 Like
4

Hi,
thanks for your interest!

the easiest place would be to create a pull request at our github Repo.
We switched to github actions to deploying files, maybe you can use this here for creating a flatpak?

See also this PR for the improved building of the snap packages:

1 Like
5

Okay. I started a PR at https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/pull/5409 lets see if we can bring this into a usable state.

1 Like
6

BTW I personally would prefer flatpak. In contrast to snap, you can also self-host it, so you stay in control, and it is widely supported. (snap is not so nice to setup in many distros and snap’s security depends on AppArmor, which is not always available in many distros)
Also – in contrast to snaps – flatpaks do not only claim to be distro-independent, but actually are.
Furthermore even Linux Mint criticizes snap, because you cannot self-host a snap server as it is proprietary and (thus) also cannot modify the packages that are served centralized by Ubuntu.

And it seems you’ve made nearly all steps to get it into Flathub, but I still cannot find it.

So I’ve commented on your PR to resolve that.

7

The instructions to setup snapd on other distros can be found here: https://snapcraft.io/jabref
If you want to modify the jabref snap package you don’t need the store to be open source, you can download the snapcraft.yaml file and rebuild the snap, exactly like you would a flatpak json from flathub.
The issue with the flatpak file we have is that it must be kept up to date, and cannot reside in the JabRef repo… we would have to import it in a flathub repo, and remember to update it there whenever there is a new release.
The snap meanwhile is useful also for testing purposes, since it’s possible to have multiple channels with stable/beta/rolling dev versions.