evaluate appimage for linux releases

[feep]

Would be better to be in the official repos. But that's a lot of work. And in many cases we have little control, sometimes you have to be an official maintainer.

Best for now is probably to document the process for maintainers.

How do we release Qri Desktop for linux before it is in the repos?

What is appimage?

Briefly, it is like a Mac .app app package folder.

Instead of a folder it is distributed as a single executable that extracts itself and its dependencies into a hidden squashfs mount and runs from there.

Download one file, set as executable, run it.

Does not need to be in any special repo or listing. Does not require any dependency install.

Eh. That's all I know until I try it.

Related

qri-io/qri#1270
qri-io/website#199

[feep]

@ramfox @dustmop @b5, this look ok?

Linux packages are a mess, this looks like the best way to have a simple, no-dependency single-file download for Desktop.

If I build an appimage, can I mention it in #linux and get Linux users to try the package?

[dustmop]

Sure, I think we should go forward with trying AppImage. The other alternative is Flatpak, but I don't have enough information to really judge which is preferred. Do we know if electron-builder can produce AppImage directly?

[feep]

The other alternative is Flatpak

Flatpak and Snap require lots of dependencies outside of Qri.

A Flatpak package would require a Flatpak install, then a Qri Desktop install. We don't want to put anything in the way of Qri Desktop.

Since Desktop doesn't require any persistent dependencies (daemons, whatever), it doesn't need anything outside of Electron.

Electron is big. But the point is, Desktop runs when you click it, goes away when you're done.

So we can use a simpler .appimage package.

Do we know if electron-builder can produce AppImage directly?

Build is (will be =]) a separate issue.

I've seen electron-builder mentioned.

But I've never used electron-builder, so I can't comment if it would work for Desktop's build.

Point here is to for me to build it, see how it runs for me and other linux users.

Then I can evaluate CI.