Distribute an AppImage

[tani]

This issue is related with #185 #140.
Now I'm making an AppImage of tectonic. And I can show you my recipe because I have an appimage of tectonic. However, AppImage requires a package to have tectonic.desktop and tectonic.png. Currently I use a dummy icon to make a sample package but I'd like to use officially icon for the package. Do you have any plan to make icon. Thank you.

$ cargo build --release
$ ./linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage --icon-file=./tectonic.png --desktop-file=./tectonic.desktop --appdir=./target/release --executable=./target/release/tectonic --output=appimage

[pkgw]

@xtaniguchimasaya Thank you for undertaking this!

There is no official Tectonic icon or logo right now, just because no one has made one yet. I will admit that I am not a big fan of not-so-good icons drawn by non-artists so I haven't wanted to try making one myself. What does your dummy icon look like?

[tani]

Honestly, my sample icon is just a box filled by black. However, I create a new icon for you. How about it?

It means that the tectonic is one of distribution for TeX ecosystem and all in one.

[pkgw]

@xtaniguchimasaya Thank you for making that! Feel free to use it in your AppImage package for now. You have inspired me to see if I can hire a professional designer to come up with an "official" logo (I am sure that there are lots of non-obvious best practices involved) but I don't want your work to be stuck on anything like that.

[tani]

Okay, I use that icon until making up an official logo. Next, I have already had an AppImage of this project, as I said. AppImage has no central repository. It means that these AppImage is preferred to distribute from upstream themselves. Of course, I can make the repository to use GitHub Releases for users, but I'd like to upload them to tectonic-typesetting/tectonic-appimage repository if you accept. For example, Krita that is drawing software from KDE distributes the AppImage in their project website. It expresses good to all users because that is latest and nearest from upstream/HEAD.
Thirdparty repositories are also used frequently but the lifetime of the repository is unknown regardless of the lifetime of upstream project. How about this proposal?

[probonopd]

Now I'm making an AppImage of tectonic.

Can the AppImage be downloaded somewhere for testing? Thanks.
It would best be uploaded to https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/releases.

[pkgw]

I agree that it would be good to get the AppImage as close to the official repo as possible!

In this tectonic repo there is already a dist/ subdirectory that contains some files used for packaging Tectonic in various systems. If the resources used to create the AppImage are not ridiculously large, I would very much like to bundle them in there.

But if it would be more convenient to make a separate tectonic-appimage repository for those files, that is great too.

I also agree with @probonopd that I think the files should be uploaded to the "releases" section, if they will fit.

[tani]

@probonopd Now I upload recipe and binary to GitHub.

https://github.com/xtaniguchimasaya/tectonic-appimage

@pkgw I'm happy to hear that. I guess we can put the build script for AppImage in dist/, but it uses git submodule to build AppImage. I try to use parent directory to build AppImage. Then I send it as pull request.

[pkgw]

OK, this is merged! I made an AppImage for the 0.1.11 release and uploaded it as a GitHub release artifact. The link is https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/releases/download/v0.1.11/Tectonic-0.1.11-x86_64.AppImage

[probonopd]

Great @pkgw. There are still some minor issues with the AppImage that currently make it fail the automated test, should be possible to be fixed easily. Please see AppImage/appimage.github.io#1025 (comment).