Nightly Subsurface AppImage for most Linux distributions

[Miika Turkia]

On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 October 2015 at 14:26, probono <probono at puredarwin.org> wrote:
>> 2015-10-18 12:50 GMT+02:00 Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com>:
>>> on Linux the install location of this printing_templates
>>> folder should be:
>>> /usr/share/subsurface/printing_templates
>>
>> Added to the AppImage.
>>
>
> some grantlee plugins are missing as well, but i don't know where to
> put these on Linux. probably Dirk knows.
>
> there should be:
> <some-location>/
>     grantlee/
>         5.0/
>             grantlee_defaultfilters.so
>             grantlee_defaulttags.so
>             grantlee_i18ntags.so
>             grantlee_loadertags.so

I think these can be put within the AppImage just like any other lib.

>>> do have to copy them outside of the AppImage
>>> manually?
>>
>> Why would you even want to do that?
>>
>> Anyhow, this is one way:
>> While Subsurface is running, do
>> cat /proc/mounts | grep Subsurface | cut -d " " -f 2
>> This will show you where the AppImage is FUSE-mounted so that you can
>> copy the files from there.
>>
>> Or, if Subsurface is not running, you can do
>> sudo mount Subsurface_4.5.0_x86_64.AppImage /mnt/
>> and then copy the files from /mnt/
>>
>
> the AppImage is mounted as a read-only filesystem.
> we include some HTML which the Subsurfaces enumerates from a folder.
> the user can edit in-place the bundled files or even import more files
> to the same folder.
>
> but if the AppImage is read-only one cannot add files to the folder
> from where these HTML files are read.
> for that to work either the AppImage needs to be RW (don't think
> that's an option), the AppImage needs to be installed or a RW location
> (e.g. $HOME) or the app needs to copy these files to a RW location -
> preferably via scripting and not on the source code side.
>
> if AppImage is used on Linux, copying said files to a RW location
> would only be needed on Linux as this is not a problem on Windows
> (since we install) or OSX (AFAIK).

Well, even now most of the people run subsurface from a location that
is not writable by the said user. At least the Ubuntu packaging does
that. I think we should have all the modifiable stuff in the
.subsurface directory, or whatever the default log storage location
happens to be. The shipped templates and all should reside in read
only area (whether it is dir permission or ro mounted bundle).

BTW I always thought that OSX uses similar software bundles, at least
I thought one cannot write to them.

>>> 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 ?)
>>
>> This is something I try to avoid. The reason is that I don't want to
>> encourage people to have to "install" software. Or even unpack.
>> Reasons for this are summarized in
>> http://portablelinuxapps.org/docs/1.0/AppImageKit.pdf
>
> "The AppImage format has been created with specific objectives in mind"
> of course, everything in the list makes perfect sense. here are some
> remarks about corner cases that i have, so excuse my chatter.
>
> "Remove the need for installation AppImages contain the app in a
> format that allows it to run directly from the archive, without having
> to be installed first. This is comparable to a Live CD. Before Live
> CDs, operating systems had to be installed first before they could be
> used."
>
> "Keep apps compressed all the time"
>
> the concept is great as an optional scenario, but it forces the
> applications to do gymnastics if it wishes to maintain a folder where
> the user can edit or update bundled files, manually or via the UI.
> having an optional install in such a case has benefits.

I just see this so that we should have all the data that is edited
somewhere under user's home directory, just the way we currently have
the XML log or git cache. There should not be any need for editing the
actual shipped software or the related files. Development is totally
different issue, and generally I see the AppImage used only for
delivering the software to end users, re-create it from scratch when
needed with updated content...

And I'll skip the rest of the e-mail as I am no expert in this area
and I do not see direct relevance for Subsurface. And of course I am
interested to hear from our AppImage expert if I have understood all
this incorrectly :D

miika