Support building flatpak packages

[moosingin3space]

This will make cross-distro packaging somewhat less of a headache.

I'd like to claim this issue -- just filing it here for tracking.

[aneeshusa]

I think this is a useful addition and would accept this, but I am not sure we want to have this as a Servo-supported packaging option. I think it may make more sense for this to be community-supported - I'd rather point to native distro packaging (e.g. by Fedora) as the officially supported packaging option (as well as our .tar.gz for nightlies). Supporting every packaging format out there is not something I think is a good use of our resources. Thoughts?

[aneeshusa]

The other thing is that AFAIK the main problem that is causing cross-platform incompatibility with our package is the libcrypto and libssl library versions. We are planning to move to NSS, and once we do that I think our .tar.gz will run out of the box in most places.

[moosingin3space]

Flatpak is designed for upstream packaging - my thought is that it would make it more convenient to install on non-Ubuntu distributions as most either support it or have packages for flatpak.

[moosingin3space]

Oops accidental click.

[heyakyra]

@aneeshusa

I think it may make more sense for this to be community-supported - I'd rather point to native distro packaging (e.g. by Fedora) as the officially supported packaging option

This makes sense to me, but that won't be for a while since it isn't close to stable yet, right?

(as well as our .tar.gz for nightlies).

This makes less sense to me. Why wouldn't you want people to be able to use Flatpak to get nightly builds and keep them up to date?

[nox]

So, should we do this or not?

[jdm]

I don't think it's something that we're going to invest time in creating. I imagine we would accept PRs that caused us to generate flatpaks, but I don't think we need to track that work in our issue tracker.