Make HDFView available on Flathub.org

#1

Flathub is “the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution”. Its an freely-accessible, community-maintained, online software collection and distribution platform for Linux. Applications there are packaged, downloaded and run with Flatpak. Flatpak “is a framework for distributing desktop applications across various Linux distributions” according to its documentation.

Flatpak now being available on major Linux distribution now-days, I think having HDFView on Flathub would be a nice addition and would help pushing latest versions to distributions faster.

I’d like to give a try at packaging and maintaining it on Flathub and I’m thus interesting in knowing what the HDF community would think of this initiative.

If that sound about right, I’d use the folowing Application ID for the HDFView Flatpak app:

org.hdfgroup.HDFView

Any comments welcomed!

#2

I like this. I work with colleagues scattered around the globe working under different IT regimes, so using different linux distros/distro versions. HDFview can be very helpful understanding why some application has problems with HDF5/NetCDF4 files. If you can keep faltpak HDFview versions current, this would be a great help for those who would otherwise have to build a more current version to view files that aren’t supported by their distro.

#3

Work in progress [flat-]packaging branch here: flathub/HDFView. Mostly working except filesystem portal integration, which makes the entire thing pretty useless for now, the code may need patching…

#4

Indeed, HDFView 3.2.0 code suffer a small bug preventing the XDG GTK portal from poping up… Patch submitted upstream here: HDFGroup / hdfview / #80. Flatpak packaging recipe submitted for Flathub review here: flathub / flathub / #3516!

#5

The app. has been accepted and is now available on flathub.org as org.hdfgroup.HDFView! That is HDFView 3.2.0 with HDF5 + HDF4 support for x86-64 & aarch64 CPUs.

#6

We just tried the installation live during our weekly HDF Clinic under ChromeOS/Crostini Linux, and it worked as advertised. Congratulations, and thank you @tchaik for your contribution!

G.

#7

Awesome! Forgot to link the bug traker: feel free to report any bugs you suspect to be Flapak related there.

#8

Interesting.

Ubuntu by default seems to be using snap and not flatpak/flathub. hmmm

#9

You can install flatpak on Ubuntu, see Ubuntu Quick Setup