Texlive installer as a flatpak package

[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.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg