Consider replacing TEI Debian packages with flatpaks

[martindholmes]

The TEI Debian packages are probably not widely used any more, and in any case, they can only be installed on debian-derived distros. A better alternative might now be to release one or more flatpaks, distributed through Flathub. Flatpaks are more widely supported than deb packages., and the flatpak sandbox model is now quite well-developed:

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html

and that would enable us to specify exactly what the packages should be allowed to do.

[lb42]

Could also consider snap . Or even appImage.

Some discussion here:
https://medium.com/@journalehsan/snap-flatpak-and-appimage-which-one-is-better-dc36f7ff1720

[martindholmes]

@lb42 We wouldn't choose Snap because it's Ubuntu-derivatives only (and some of them don't use it either), so it would be less broadly useful than debs. appImage is universal, but AFAIK it doesn't provide any automated update mechanisms or sandboxing.

[lb42]

Last time i looked tei products were all application independent xml files which could be installed by cloning from a github repo. Is that about to change for some reason? Is the tei now moving into providing software?

[martindholmes]

@lb42 We've always provided software, in the form of Debian packages:
https://packages.tei-c.org/deb/
The question is whether we should continue to do that, shift to some other packaging format that's more broadly supported, or perhaps stop providing installable packages at all. I don't think many people use the debs any more, and if not, we could reduce the burden on maintainers and release technicians by not bothering any more.

[martindholmes]

I think the first thing to do here is to poll the community to find out how many people are still installing the deb packages; I'd also like to get some stats on downloads from the package archive.