questions about portablelinuxapps & appimage packaging

[lm8]

Been looking for ways to have better backward compatibility of applications and better sharing of applications across multiple machines (without having to recompile from source on each). Was wondering if appimages might help with that.

I have lots of questions. Is there any good documentation on creating a portablelinuxapp and how the appimages work? Only documentation I could find was here: http://portablelinuxapps.org/docs/1.0/ Has anyone tried running an appimage on a BSD system? They have a Linux compatibility mode. That might increase the PortableLinuxApps distribution to not only Linux users but BSD users as well. Has anyone built any portablelinuxapps using the LSB compiler chain? Will it work? That might help with backward compatibility and portability to multiple Linux systems. Do appimages work on Debian Squeeze? Has anyone tested on that system? How hard is it to take an application and related files that were built by a script (similar to a Slackbuild script), in other words several files in a group of directories rather than a deb file, and create an appimage with it? How do these integrate with the local Linux distribution's package manager that they're being run on or do they?

Thanks.

[probono]

Hi lm8,

Been looking for ways to have better backward compatibility of applications and better sharing of applications across multiple machines (without having to recompile from source on each)

The best way to achieve this is to compile on a reasonably old system, and run on newer systems.

Was wondering if appimages might help with that

Not with the compiling, but with the packaging and deployment (you don't need to support X package systems, and the users can simply download and try your software without needing root rights).

Is there any good documentation on creating a portablelinuxapp and how the appimages work?

http://portablelinuxapps.org/docs/1.0/ is the starting point, and we're answering anything that might be left open here and will incorporate it into subsequent versions of the documentation.

Has anyone tried running an appimage on a BSD system?

No, haven't tried that yet. The main dependency of AppImage is FUSE, I'm not sure whether the Linux compatibility layer of FreeBSD can handle that. But I hear that there is a native FUSE for FreeBSD, so one could probably compile the components of AppImageKit for FreeBSD. I'm interested in this topic, but haven't tried it yet (mainly due to the lack of a proper FreeBSD Live USB system).

Has anyone built any portablelinuxapps using the LSB compiler chain? Will it work? That might help with backward compatibility and portability to multiple Linux systems.

Again, good idea but not tested yet. Our approach currently is to define a set of supported (not too recent) distros, and test each AppImage on those. We expect that the AppImages then work for newer releases as well.

Do appimages work on Debian Squeeze?

Most should, but we don't systematically test each AppImage.

How hard is it to take an application and related files that were built by a script (similar to a Slackbuild script), in other words several files in a group of directories rather than a deb file, and create an appimage with it?

Not hard at all. If your app is built in a way that doesn't use hardcoded paths, e.g., to /usr, then it's basically a matter of adding the AppRun file and a .desktop file, and you have a working AppDir that you can run through a script to get the AppImage.

How do these integrate with the local Linux distribution's package manager that they're being run on or do they?

There is no integration at all, by design. We think that the underlying base OS is best managed by the native package manager, while the end-user apps are not. Right now, they are manually managed by the user (there is really not much in the way of "management" though). We're also working on an Updater that checks for outdated versions and downloads the most recent ones.

What do you think about this, how could we improve? Please share your ideas.

[lm8]

I'm interested in this topic, but haven't tried it yet (mainly due to the lack of a proper FreeBSD Live USB system).

I think the most update FreeBSD live distribution is Frenzy. It's based on FreeBSD 8.1. FreeSBIE was based on an older distribution last time I checked. There were some live distributions of NetBSD and OpenBSD. Don't remember the names off-hand.

Has anyone built any portablelinuxapps using the LSB compiler chain? Will it work? That might help with backward compatibility and portability to multiple Linux systems.

Again, good idea but not tested yet. Our approach currently is to define a set of supported (not too recent) distros, and test each AppImage on those. We expect that the AppImages then work for newer releases as well.

I like what I read about LSB that they would maintain backward compatibility for their version of the GNU compiler and its libraries. Saw some posts that the GNU compiler had some shared library naming issues at one point that required complete recompiles of applications to make them work on systems using newer versions of the compiler. Would like to be able to compile applications once and keep using them with the system until I'm ready to recompile, not until a new upgrade of the system or compiler forces me to.

How hard is it to take an application and related files that were built by a script (similar to a Slackbuild script), in other words several files in a group of directories rather than a deb file, and create an appimage with it?

Not hard at all. If your app is built in a way that doesn't use hardcoded paths, e.g., to /usr, then it's basically a matter of adding the AppRun file and a .desktop file, and you have a working AppDir that you can run through a script to get the AppImage.

That sounds really good. If I can get Linux up and running on my desktop machine, I'd really like to give it a try. I have a lot of light-weight applications I like to run that aren't usually packaged in most distributions. It would be convenient to have a good way to package them and share them across machines.

How does this technique work for command line and ncurses based applications or is it mainly used just for applications running under X Windows?

How do these integrate with the local Linux distribution's package manager that they're being run on or do they?

There is no integration at all, by design. We think that the underlying base OS is best managed by the native package manager, while the end-user apps are not. Right now, they are manually managed by the user (there is really not much in the way of "management" though). We're also working on an Updater that checks for outdated versions and downloads the most recent ones.

Sounds a lot like what they're trying to do with PC-BSD to make application installation easier. However, I think I read they were working on integrating with the FreeBSD package manager at some point in the future as well. Don't know if there's anything useful in their techniques for making applications more portable, but they do have some documentation on it at the PC-BSD site.

Thanks for your answers.

[superfigjam]

Thanks a lot