Hello Inkscape developers and maintainers,
today I would like to propose an easy way to run and test Inkscape
on various Linux distributions. Inkscape used to provide upstream-
packaged Autopackages, but since I could no longer find them,
I wonder whether this project might be interested in providing
AppImages, which are essentially self-mounting ISOs that contain
Inkscape and all dependencies it needs to run that cannot be assumed
to be part of the base system (Linux distribution). This means that
projects like Inkscape can package once and reach users of most
desktop Linux distributions.
http://www.appimage.org
Linus Torvalds recently wrote about AppImage: "Sure, it means that the
end result is much bigger than a distro-native binary would be, but if
you want a way to build applications for your users without limiting
them to a particular distribution, or having to build fifteen
different images, it really looks like it works very well.=EF=BB=BF" -
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WyrATKUnmrS
I prepared an AppImage of the bzr version. You can download it from
https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/Inkscape/_latestVersion#files
Simply download, chmod a+x, and run.
The recipe script that generated it is is linked below, in case you
want to see how it was done and improve it. Using the recipe, it
should also be easy to generate an AppImage for 32-bit systems:
https://github.com/probonopd/AppImages/tree/master/recipes/inkscape
I have tested it on a couple of different distributions with success:
* CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveGNOME-1511.iso
* debian-live-8.0.0-amd64-xfce-desktop+nonfree.iso
* elementary_OS_0.3_freya_amd64.iso
* Fedora-Live-Workstation-x86_64-23-10.iso
* ubuntu-16.04-beta2-desktop-amd64.iso
I had to work around an issue with "undefined symbol:
g_type_check_instance_is_fundamentally_a" by bundling glib2,
this makes it run also on
* antergos-2014.08.07-x86_64.iso
* linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso
* ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
Possibly we can find a cleaner way (e.g., use CentOS 6 as the build
host) to make this workaround unneccessary.
Most likely it will run on others, too - and with some fine-tuning of
the recipe (i.e., bundling additional dependencies) on even more.
Probably the recipe is not perfect yet and might be missing some
stuff, but that should be relatively easy to fix.
If there is a continuous build system in place, this could be
integrated so that continuous/nightly/weekly images get built. Having
such builds should allow more users to run the latest bleeding-edge
version, test on multiple systems, and give earlier feedback. Of
course the AppImage format could also be used to distribute
stable/testing versions to users of most Linux distributions.
I have set up a cloud-based build system where I do the builds on
travis-ci using a build system living inside a Docker image
generated on Docker Hub. You can see this system in action here:
https://github.com/probonopd/AppImages/
Of course this would be even more useful if it was integrated
into the official Inkscape build system.
There is also an update mechanism in the works which allows users
to download binary deltas between the version they have and the latest
version. This works without central servers or repositories, you
could run it on your own project infrastructure. Makes updating
continuous builds really fast and easy.
https://github.com/probonopd/AppImageKit/blob/master/
AppImageUpdate.AppDir/README.md (this is purely optional though).
Is the Inkscape project interested in maintaing an upstream-generated
AppImage, as projects like Krita, MuseScore, and Scribus already do?
Upstream packaging would have the advantage that users/testers get
the software exactly in the way the upstream team intended, with
the correct versions of the libraries bundled together with the
application. What could be improved?
Regards
probono
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