[digiKam-users] THANKS: a .deb Package for DK 7.50 ...

[Gilles Caulier]

Le mar. 25 janv. 2022 à 08:06, Remco Viëtor <remco.vietor at wanadoo.fr> a
écrit :

> On lundi 24 janvier 2022 13:42:22 CET pixelpiet at web.de wrote:
> > But I would have a constructive proposal. Perhaps the Digikam project
> > should take an example of the distribution of DarkTable, which reach a
> > wide range of Linux versions via SUSE OBS in native versions.
>
> But that requires users with the time and willingness to build for those
> distributions, and ideally test them...
>
> And sometimes it's not easy to get the newest versions to build cleanly
> with
> all features when the target distribution doesn't have the correct version
> of
> a dependency installed (you won't get distributions to update to a new
> library
> version just for one program, if that means other things could break).
>

Hi,

This is why, for Linux we provide a complete AppImage bundle, which is so
far much easy to use from a user-viewpoint. Snap and Flatpak use a guarded
environnement de facto to run applications in the host system. This is the
hell for users to communicate with other native applications due to
restrictions. It's also the hell to access the host files, or to
communicate with the service through the network. All for security reasons
of course, but too much is too much.

AppImage is really more simple : the application and libraries bundled are
hosted in a chroot file system in memory (ISO9660) and decompressed at run
time and attached somewhere in /tmp. There are no restrictions by default,
but you can manage the bundle in a service to guard applications at
run-time.

Personally, I'm lost with Flatpak and Snap, and I maintain all the digiKam
bundles including AppImage, this last one is really very powerful. We
package all the rolling release shared libraries to run digiKam and
Showfoto. We have full control of the bundle contents, and we automate the
deployment of daily bundles including last changes done by developers. It's
the best way to test last changes to see if bugs reported are really fixed.

With AppImage, just download the file, and make it as executable. Place the
file where you want, nothing will be installed on your system. You can test
AppImage in parallel with a native package already installed. For the main
release, you must backup your database to prevent side effects if changes
are done in database structure, to be able to go back to a previous version
if necessary.

We don't want to use the cloud to make bundles at all. We want full control
of the build system to be sure about security. And more, for Windows
installers, ALL is cross compiled under Linux, there is no Windows system
at all to compile code. There is no risk of virus, and managing Windows
deployment is so far easy under Linux than under Windows...

Voilà

Gilles Caulier
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