Nightly Subsurface AppImage for most Linux distributions

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 18 October 2015 at 12:17, probono <probono at puredarwin.org> wrote:
> 2015-10-17 19:48 GMT+02:00 Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com>:
>> one question though: what if the bundle includes files which the
>> application modifies e.g. configuration files, custom HTML files, etc.
>> do you have a method to install the AppImage in say ~/subsurface like
>> a Windows installer?
>
> Usually applications populate $HOME upon the first application launch,
> e.g., in $XDG_DATA_HOME. Otherwise, a small helper script inside the
> AppImage could do it.

we have a printing_templates folder which includes a sub-folder and
some HTML files which can be edited by the application and saved
locally.
on Windows these are installed in the folder where the binary is. this
also works on Linux as the user can test the binary in the build
folder, but on Linux the install location of this printing_templates
folder should be:
/usr/share/subsurface/printing_templates

it seems to be missing in the AppImage, but even if included the
question arises: do have to copy them outside of the AppImage
manually? that's not really comfortable, since we need to handle the
case where this is not needed on Windows.

i'm not familiar with how AppImage works, but have you thought about:
myImageFile.AppImage -install ~/somewhere

in which case the complete AppImage deploys to a folder and running
the app can be done via something in the lines of:
cd ~/somewhere
./run (or ./AppRun ?)

BTW, what AppImage does very closely resemble how a lot of Linux
software ports work on Windows, e.g. git, mingw, nano, etc.
they have the usr, bin, lib, share folders, and the binaries are built
against the OS, but are the whole folder is app-folder is technically
standalone and can be copy-pasted around and still work without
complicated installation processes.

lubomir
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