Distributing MyPaint as an AppImage and/or Snap Package

odysseywestra · March 7, 2016, 7:40am

I think it would be awesome to Distribute MyPaint as an AppImage on our Github Release Page. It’s distro agnostic and could be easily installed with a bash script. On the flip side its portable meaning people could bring it to Linux Conventions and meetings on a USB stick and be able to demonstrate it without having to fuss with the package manager. Basically this can be our official build we support for Linux.

What are your guys thoughts? Should we give this a shot? What could be the hurdles we need to overcome to make this possible?

odysseywestra · April 18, 2016, 5:14am

Another Benefit of using AppImages on Linux is that we wouldn’t have to deal with GTK and GDK breaking MyPaint with every version release.

probono · April 23, 2016, 10:05pm

That would be awesome.
Especially nightly/continuous builds.

Does MyPaint master build on CentOS 6? That would be the preferred build system because the resulting AppImage will run on most halfway recent distributions. See pkg2appimage/recipes at master · AppImageCommunity/pkg2appimage · GitHub for examples of how to put together an AppImage.

odysseywestra · June 3, 2016, 4:26pm

We could also distribute the package as a Snap Package as well too. I’m experimenting with mypaint on this so I’ll let you know how that goes. If the snap package is feasible, I’ll talk to @achadwick about creating a repository were we can store the yml files and push the snap package to the Ubuntu store.

achadwick · June 4, 2016, 4:35pm

CentOS 6 is ancient. It doesn’t even support GTK3, see Install GTK3 in CentOS 6.5 - CentOS

achadwick · June 4, 2016, 4:47pm

Our Travis CI stuff currently builds on Trusty, but its libgtk is too old for the (runtime-only) Python GUI code. Happy to accept patches to it though, if these things need automating.

Anyone know of a Linux CI solution with a modern-ish GTK (3.12+) and support for build artefact access?

achadwick · June 4, 2016, 4:49pm

I don’t have time to investigate any new builds myself, but I am happy to add people to @mypaint/packagers and make repositories for them.

probono · October 30, 2016, 10:32pm

This pull request, when merged, will generate and upload an AppImage of each commit. It does so by bundling MyPaint, Python, and the required Python modules inside the AppImage.

probono · November 12, 2016, 2:09pm

My Pull Request seems to be stuck, is anything wrong with it?

achadwick · November 14, 2016, 12:46pm

I merged it, but it now breaks the build. Can you have a look?

github.com/mypaint/mypaint

Appimage builds from Travis are broken

opened 12:44PM - 14 Nov 16 UTC

closed 09:21PM - 15 Nov 16 UTC

achadwick

Our build's invocation of the Appimage stuff is failing. Example build failure (…from https://travis-ci.org/mypaint/mypaint/builds/175674973#L6346): ``` [...] Resolving github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com (github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com)... 54.231.50.50 Connecting to github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com (github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com)|54.231.50.50|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 440600 (430K) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘appimagetool’ 100%[======================================>] 440,600 1.28MB/s in 0.3s 2016-11-14 11:24:00 (1.28 MB/s) - ‘appimagetool’ saved [440600/440600] +chmod a+x ./appimagetool +set +x This doesn't look like a squashfs image. Cannot mount AppImage, please check your FUSE setup. You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage if you run it with the --appimage-extract option. See https://github.com/probonopd/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE for more information open dir error: No such file or directory ``` As of 0b7a3db6af146196c94b4b956a2957f0882e1c47 I have had to appended "|| true" to the Travis invocation of our Appimage, so that the Travis checks can still be useful. @probonopd can you help out? Please comment here and I will assign this issue to you. I'm afraid I do not have time to debug or maintain code I do not run and therefore cannot test, so you are de facto maintainer of this code for now.

probono · December 2, 2016, 1:59pm

Seems to be working now, I just downloaded the AppImage of your latest build from the transfer.sh URL in the Travis CI build log:

https://transfer.sh/14JBKD/mypaint-glibc2.15-x86-64.appimage

It is running well for me on elementary_OS_0.3_freya_amd64.iso.

odysseywestra · February 1, 2017, 7:54am

I’ve started a new thread about creating a snap package for MyPaint:
https://community.mypaint.org/t/creating-a-mypaint-snap-package/605

probono · February 12, 2017, 10:09am

The AppImages get built and uploaded upon each push to GitHub, the latest one being transfer.sh/jO4gQ/mypaint-glibc2.15-x86-64.appimage

It would be nice if the AppImage could be provided for download on Releases · mypaint/mypaint · GitHub too, because otherwise people won’t find it.

odysseywestra · February 12, 2017, 11:04am

I think that is in the roadmap. Right Now @achadwick is working on a way to replace scons as a build dep. with MyPaint. Once that is committed, we’ll have to update all the CI tools and documentation to support it. After that I think we can work on getting test builds in the hands of users faster.