OmegaT packaged with Flatpak
It took me a while since I announced I retired OmegaT from Fedora and my first try to deploy it with Flatpak and, I hope, Flathub. There were some reasons:
- I was completely new to Flatpak,
- the big amount of work to write the manifest of a non trivial application compiled completely from scratch,
- the complexity at that time of working with Java and Flatpak.
Well, it has been time to resume the task. I’m not really an OmegaT user (I’ve used it just a few times in all these years) but I feel committed helping it to be better known and used in the Linux Desktop. In the past I made a lot of work with technical translations and I fully understand the power of the tool for profesional users and it’s opensource: as far as I know OmegaT is the best CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) opensource tool in the world.
So I’m here again and did some work for a final product. Today the work is a lot of easier because the existence of the OpenJDK Flatpak extension (see this update from Mat Booth). Thanks for this extension! It’s so nice I’m finishing other two java programs to be published at Flathub: Freeplane and JClic. For this release series I’m taking the easy way of packaging the binary portable bundle instead of compiling from sources because… it’s tedious. I am concerned it’s not the best practice. And this time I’ve started from a more recent version beta 5.2.0.
I invite you to give it a try and provide some feedback if any. Some details:
- install it:
- $ wget https://dl.bintray.com/olea/org.omegat.App.flatpak (about 170Mb);
- $ flatpak install --user org.omegat.App.flatpak
- a merge request at upstream for moving the XDG metadata resources;
- it will be using org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.openjdk11, the LTS OpenJDK extension at Flathub.
Remember when you install a Flatpak package it is fully self-contained, you don’t need to install anything more (in this case the JRE is included in the bundle) and it’s isolated from the rest of the desktop so you’ll be able to keep an install indefinitely without worrying it will broke on any operating system update.
Remember too you could install this bundle in any modern Linux desktop. The only requirement is to have Flatpak installed, as more recents versions of Linux are.
Next steps:
- finishing a final manifest to propose to Flathub in a couple days or so, which will be, as far as I am concerned, the main publishing site of the Flatpak bundle; when in Flathub any user could install it pointing and clicking as in any other app store;
- getting accepted at upstream my minor contributions, basicaly metadata;
- extending the bundle with some of the most popular OmegaT extensions and dictionaries;
- and eventually rewrite the manifest for compiling from sources.
Hope you’ll find it useful.
PD: fixed how to install the package from CLI and changed a couple times the downloading URL :-/