Gnome-latex on Linux/Unix distributions

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

Hi,

I’m the main developer of gnome-latex.

I’ve been asked by email by a user why the gnome-latex package has been removed when doing an upgrade to Fedora 36. Basically the application is no longer available in the Fedora repositories.

In the past there was a mailing list for the application to ask such questions, so I will reply here since it can be useful to other people.

One year or two years ago, I’ve put the project aside (“in the fridge”), because the application worked fine for my needs and I didn’t want to continue its development as before. The problem is that I explicitly said so in the project documentation, instead of just leaving things like this. So the project was archived and then some distributions were prompt to remove the package from their repositories.

So the project was frozen, then now unfrozen (thawed), but I find it strange that some projects are packaged in distributions and for which the last release dates back from more than 5 years ago, sometimes 10 years ago.

So I must admit that I’m disappointed, but that’s life. It doesn’t motivate me to work as much as before for free software projects.

To more directly answer the question wrt. Fedora and how to install gnome-latex: see the package on koji (and for other distributions / operating systems, see this list). On Fedora, you can download a binary package from koji, then install it with dnf install <local_file.rpm>, but you may need to do the same for the tepl and amtk libraries (I have not checked if they are still present in the Fedora RPM repositories).

That’s it, thanks for your feedback, I was initially not aware that the application was removed from some distributions. I even did the initial packaging work for Fedora and Gentoo.

Cheers,
Sébastien

[gunibert (Günther Wagner)]

I think todays solution to this problem is to publish it on flathub. So you take over the packaging problem to yourself and it will last. Another advantage of that is people on immutable OSes can benefit from that too (happy silverblue user here)

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

Flatpak or a similar technology would indeed be better nowadays.

But even with Flatpak, there are warnings when using old runtimes. Flatpak was advertised as something where the developers can choose one runtime, plus bundle some specific versions of libraries, so that the users use the exact same versions from what the developers used. On Flathub I have the impression that using an old runtime or bundling a customized version of a library is a little frowned upon.

With Flatpak it’s also possible to ship a single file that users can download. But the warnings would still be there for old runtimes.

But yes, I agree that Flatpak/Flathub would be a better solution nowadays

[bilelmoussaoui (Bilal Elmoussaoui)]

You can still choose whatever runtime you want to use, Flathub just doesn’t accept builds that are “no longer receiving security updates” runtimes. You can still download that runtime and build the flatpak locally if you wish to do so.

That is mostly done to push developers to update the runtime and include the dependencies that were removed in the recent runtimes or that were updated to a newer version and developer wishes to stick to an older release.