I tried building an AppImage, Part 1

bgstack15 — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 13:05:27 GMT

I recently read a discussion about AppImage, and of course Ubuntu had its recent news that Flatpak is not installed by default in the latest silly-named Ubuntu version (23.04, I assume). I also recently had to use my first AppImage, for OpenShot. There was a bug in the Devuan unstable package of this app, where the user cannot drag the right edge of a video clip to shorten its duration. So I tried the AppImage, and the bug was fixed there!

I decided to investigate building an AppImage. It tends to be focused on desktop applications. The only (relatively simple) one I package that I could think of quickly is FreeFileSync, so I tried adapting my Open Build Service package to include an appimage.

Open Build Service uses an OpenSUSE 42.3 distribution environment, for which I know very little about the available packages. Unfortunately, FreeFileSync aggressively follows its upstream dependencies' version releases, and of course anything not bleeding edge does not have the right package versions. OpenSuSE 42.3 didn't even have some of the older versions of the (wxGTK-related) packages necessary, so my AppImage build process left me frustrated.

I will try again, and instead of packaging from source, I'll try to adapt the existing dpkg I do maintain.

Knowledge Base (Posts about appimage)

I tried building an AppImage, Part 1