TIL the Slack flatpak just cheekily downloads the snap version in the background and massages it into something flatpak can use:
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@nathandyer @jalefkowit That is not weird at all when you think about it. For years any distro that was not rpm or deb based would just repackage proprietary rpm or debs into their own format.
This is the same. Slack only officially support snap and not flatpak. The contents of the package however are useful for packaging into the unsupported format.
I am the maintainer of the Slack package for Slackware (yes that is confusing) and I do the same. I turn the snap into a native package.
@nathandyer Also to be clear for that flatpak it does not download it in the background. That happens once as part of the build (repack). It is then fetched by users from flathub natively. Put another way individual flathub user machines never contact Canonical servers and fetch the snap.
@nathandyer But again this is no more cheeky than Arch users using the Chrome AUR, which fetches a Google Chrome deb and repacks to to Arch native format.
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=google-chrome
This is how it is done for pretty much every single bit of proprietary software on Linux where upstream provides no package in the format you need and no source.
Consider for a moment, how else could it work? 🤔
