An appimage would be good for *testing* purposes.
Having it as a general production Inkscape I think is not such a great idea; we already have in place the possibility to build inkscape for a great number of Linux OSes and ending that would not be popular.
Not to mention we'd still need to maintain builds for osx and windows; this would go against the whole cmake work that has been done partially to address that builds system complication.
2016-04-19 0:27 GMT+02:00 Josh Andler <scislac@...400...>:
> I agree with Adib, with a little more testing it would be great to be able
> to offer these builds.
>
> probono: if the system building these is multiarch, they'd be able to build
> for 32bit as well, correct?
Yes, it is possible to build AppImages for different architectures.
For example, the MuseScore project provides
i686 (32-bit), x86_64 (64-bit), and armhf (new 32-bit)
https://musescore.org/en/download#AppImage
> I have a user who would be willing to test a
> 32bit build as they're stuck on an ancient release of Ubuntu (a first half
> of the alphabet release).
The current Inkscape AppImage is built on CentOS 7 which means that it
has a dependency on glibc 2.17. So I would expect that you need at
least a 2013ish distribution to run the Inkscape AppImage on. A
"middle of the alphabet" version of Ubuntu would be Maverick Meerkat
alias Ubuntu 10.10, released in 2010. So it will not run there (Ubuntu
13.04 is probably the minimum required for the Inkscape AppImage the
way it is currently built; although I didn't test).
This is because in order to save space and redundancy, the AppImage
doesn't contain each and every library (starting from glibc itself),
but only contains these libraries that cannot reasonably be expected
to be part of the base system (which is loosely defined as "not too
outdated desktop distributions"). For the dependencies that are not
bundled inside the AppImage, the version present at runtime must not
be older than the version that was present at compile time (in case of
the current Inkscape AppImage, CentOS 7).
If we really want to target systems such as Ubuntu 10.10, there are two options:
1. Get Inkscape to build on a really old system such as Ubuntu 10.10
or older. This way it will not depend on any newer libraries than are
in Ubuntu 10.10 (besides the ones we bundle inside the AppImage which
are allowed to be newer, als long as they, too, have been compiled on
Ubuntu 10.10 or older). This is likely cumbersome, because the current
build scripts assume newer versions of many dependencies to be present
at build time. As mentioned before, I attempted to build on CentOS 6
(which is from the 2011 era) and didn't succeed (possibly it can be
done by an experienced Inkscape developer).
2. Bundle each and every dependency inside the AppImage, including
stuff like glibc and GTK.This will make the AppImage significantly
larger and its contents more redundant.
So as always, there is a tradeoff. Applications like Firefox or
OpenOffice are deliberately built on old systems as to maximize binary
compatibility with all but the most recent systems.
More on the background of AppImageKit and its workings on
https://github.com/probonopd/AppImageKit/blob/master/README.md
Happy testing!
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