On Fedora Silverblue the recommended way to install applications is to use flatpak.
Lots of flatpaks are available on flathub.org, both open source (such as Firefox) and proprietary (such as Skype). I know that there is a license field, but that does not indicate whether the flatpak is built from source (and thus can be rebuilt by me) or just a packaged binary of an open source project. One example is Anki, which is apparently just a repackaged version of the upstream binary and which seems to be difficult to build from source, even though it is AGPL licensed.
So, is there a way to see if a flatpak contains binary only content or is actually built from scratch?
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To my knowledge, the easiest way would be to check the .json/.yml I’m the flatpak git repos. They are very readable and would probably answer your question very fast.
Yes, I thought so too, but I am not sure what to look out for. Often there are multiple archives listed there and those are basically just a link to some .tar.gz
, which can be anything, source or packed binary. So I would have to download and unpack all of those. Even finding some make command in there does not seem to be enough, as some archives could still be binary only.