It is open source, MIT licensed so is it just hard or are there real blockers? I believe this is a relatively popular package and it would be nice to have those in the official repository. 
If you sponsor a package manager ⌠who know.
There is a flatpack. see on the bottom
It is inofficial
flatpak install flathub com.vscodium.codium
From what I heard the flatpak doesnât work too good, do you have any experience with it? (Youâll need to punch a whole lot of holes in the container to give the IDE access to all the hostâs libraries and stuff, kind of diminishes the reasons for a flatpak in the first place.)
At work I use VS Code from Microsoftâs RPM repository which works fine, but in private I wanted to try Codium.
Anyway, the search engines are really helpful for finding ways to install it in any other way, but I couldnât find the answer to why it was not in the official repositories thatâs why I asked it here. Iâm a package maintainer (I guess you meant that by manager 
) myself so I might even package it myself or help with it. Just wondering why no one has done it before.
Actually⌠Would someone be willing to do it in exchange for some sponsoring? How much would it be (ballpark)?
The problem is not with VS Codium itself, but rather with Electron ⌠Nobody has figured out a way to package it in a way that both works and is compatible with our technical and legal requirements for official Fedora packages.
3 Likes
I canât speak for VSCodium, but Iâve used VSCode from flatpak and itâs worked just fine for me. Itâs not my main IDE by any means, but I wrote docs like this using it:
Thanks for the insight, would you have a link or some more detail on this? One of Linuxâs and Fedoras selling points for me is to get all open source software out of the official (+rpmfusion for legal reasons) repository and Iâd like to keep it that ways as much as possible. Or have we as a community just given up on that approach and moved on to using flathub and stuff?
If it is for legal reasons it could be in RPM fusion at least, right? And for the technical reasons with electron: Maybe we should look for ways to solve that or change the rules to make it work? Just giving up and going with proprietary build software or various third party repositories doesnât really sound like the best solution to me. (No offense meant to anyone involved here, I really just want to figure out what has been attempted so far and maybe we can work together to make Fedora better in the long run )
As noted, and from an outside perspective, the issue is âelectronâ upon which VS Codium apparently depends. Since so far that has no chance of being distributed by fedora then Codium cannot be distributed as well.
There are in fact many very good software items that are distributed by 3rd party repos which cannot be included in fedora â nvidia drivers, VirtualBox, etc. are among those. As such the 3rd party repos are a vital part of the linux ecosystem we depend upon.
Rpmfusion is not located within the US so it has different legal boundaries than Fedora and can distribute software that may be restricted by US based companies. Ubuntu also has different rules in what it may include just as another example.
For now at least, it seems that 3rd party repos are the solution for VS Codium while trying to work through the legal and other restrictions that block Fedora from distributing that package and supporting software. Individual users may not have the same restrictions, but the fedora project does.
i dont know if there is a individual maintainer of some package in fedora like opensuse did (community repo = packman)
If I understand correctly, packaging Electron and applications that run on it is theoretically possible, but would require a lot of work. Electron shares many issues with Chromium (on which it is based), and maintaining the Chromium package in Fedora - and keeping it up-to-date - is already quite difficult.
Things look at least a bit better for some applications, which can be built in a way that allows them to use an âexternally providedâ Electron runtime instead of bundling their own copy of Electron. Not sure if that is possible for VS Codium though - if it canât be built to use an external Electron runtime, then packaging it becomes more difficult (i.e. packaging Electron itself plus packaging VS Codium in the same package).
2 Likes