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hanzala123 / arch2appimage

This is a python script that downloads Arch Linux packages (Official/Chaotic AUR) and converts to an AppImage executable
GNU General Public License v3.0
339 stars 11 forks source link

Hi, I'm arch-deployer's developer, that's why I've left #25

Open ivan-hc opened 1 year ago

ivan-hc commented 1 year ago

Hi, I'm glad my project was inspirational, that was the purpose.

I had written Arch-Deployer because I wanted to create AppImage packages of newer programs to run on older distributions. Unfortunately every program on linux depends on GLIBC, and these libraries on Arch Linux they are too new, so programs for Arch Linux will never run on an older distribution.

Being patchelf and similar tools far beyond my technical knowledge, I preferred to abandon the project in favour AppImages from PPA and various sources.

I hope this message of mine will be useful for you to improve your program.

See you soon, and good luck!

itz-me-zappex commented 1 year ago

i'm a bit late, but why just don't include glibc package into appimage? it should work i guess.

ivan-hc commented 1 year ago

I might agree with you, but including libc would make the final package "bloated". That's why it's recommended to build the AppImage on older systems (the creator of the AppImage himself would recommend using Ubuntu 18.04, while I normally build everything on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, to avoid general support issues). The AppImage package format allows for file compression to save filesystem space. I work a lot with AppImage packages to prevent the use of Flatpak "runtimes", which is the only real reason I avoid them. If I were to include unnecessary files, I'd end up repeating the problem that prevents me the use of Flatpak. The author of the AppImage packages posted on https://apprepo.de seems to usually create AppImage packages that include such libraries, and that's why I don't include them in my repository (at https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM-Application-Manager), too many MegaBytes or GigaBytes for single application, although I must say , they work well... but it would be better to use Flatpak at this point. The so-called "standard" packaging recommended by the creator of the AppImage format seems to be the only right way forward at this point. My Chromium browser is compiled from PPA and takes up less than 200MB on the filesystem, while the same AppImage built with Arch-deployer took up almost 300MB to work properly enough. That said, Arch Linux packages are not good for this kind of work. Better to use them via docker/podman/distrobox/junest, at this point, because they are much better solutions than Flatpak, for sure.