Provide AppImage for Munadi
Assalam Alaikum,
I have talked with you previously about the problems you are facing with the fragmentation on the Linux desktop.
You said that (and I'm paraphrasing here):
- Supporting and maintaining native packages for individual Linux distributions is a nightmare because library versions can vary wildly across different distributions and are often outdated or out of sync.
- Snap has very old dependencies. The dependencies with core20 are good enough but it doesn't support qmake.
- Flatpak works nicely with qmake. But because of its sandboxed nature, a lot of features that are nice to have in an Athan app are very hard or almost impossible to implement like system tray icons or notifications to remind you to pray.
- We can't expect all people to know how to compile from source.
I thought about it. And while I agree with what you said, I think there's a method you overlooked in your analysis which is AppImages.
This is basically the Linux world version of .exe files for Windows. Here's a simple breakdown:
Advantages | Drawbacks |
---|---|
Compatible with pretty much every Linux distribution | Needs to be redownloaded with every update |
Simple to install: No need to worry about dependencies or to use root privileges | All dependencies and libraries being included in the AppImage makes it heavier on hard disk space |
It also needs to be rebuilt with every update but that can apparently be automated with gitlab-ci.
It's also apparently compatible with most build systems with instructions available on their website for cmake and qmake.
Disclaimer: I'm new to development and have never built an AppImage before so some things I said might be wrong. Here's the documentation for more accurate info.