minutes of ESC call ...

[probono]

Hello, AppImage developer here. May I quickly add my perspective:

> is there a central app-store / location to find appimages ?

One objective for the AppImage format is to have a single downloadable
file for Linux that can be provided on the original (upstream)
project's download pages, next to EXE (Windows) and DMG (macOS) files,
and not rely on any central gatekeeper such as a distribution, or a
store. That being said, anyone can make a "directory" of AppImages.
The AppImage project maintains a list of known AppImages on
https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/AppImages, and there are
sites like https://www.openDesktop.org/ that collect software,
including AppImages.

> if 2 people use it – build it themselves pwrt

On http://linux-appimages.org the inofficial LibreOffice AppImage was
the download #1 within just a few days of being uploaded. And that is
while this site has not been advertised or announced so far. So I'd
assume there is quite some interest.

> how large is it?

The AppImage of the latest daily build with all languages and help
files is 271 MB when stripped. I used
find LibreOfficeDev.AppDir/ -type f -executable -or -name *.so* -exec
strip {} \;

> If infra doesnt want to host the appimages, Antonio can host them

It is strongly advised that users get AppImages - and, for that
matter, any software, even on Windows and macOS - from the official
projects and not from "random" download sites. (Yes I know who Antonio
is and I trust him, but we can't expect the average user to know.)

> chmod +x <downloaded-file-name>"

This is a Unix security feature. You can set the executable bit from
the properties window of most (all?) desktop environments. With th
increasing popularity of AppImages, it is to be expected that desktop
environments will handle ELF files with missing executable bits more
intelligently (i.e., ask the user what to do).

> no real need for Linux portable edition
> tar-ball can be unzipped

So can the AppImage:
./some.AppImage --appimage-extract

An AppImage has the added benefit that it does not have to be
unpacked, because it mounts itself, which is a very fast operation and
is space-efficient.

The discussion so far is missing AppImageUpdate zsync-based binary
delta updates, which means that you can do from daily build to daily
build by just downloading the few MB that actually have changed. This
is much, much faster, easier, and more efficient than what is
currently in place. I could imagine this to be especially valuable to
testers, who want the latest daily build every day.