[scribus-dev] Scribus 1.5.1svn AppImage

[probono]

Hello Scribus developers and maintainers,

today I would like to propose an easy way to run and test 1.5.1svn on
Linux systems. I prepared an AppImage, which is essentially a
self-mounting ISO, that contains the latest development version of
Scribus and all dependencies it needs to run that cannot be assumed to
be part of the base system (Linux distribution).

You can download it from
https://github.com/probonopd/AppImages/releases/tag/scribus
Simply download, chmod a+x, and run.

Linus Torvalds recently wrote about AppImage: "Sure, it means that the
end result is much bigger than a distro-native binary would be, but if
you want a way to build applications for your users without limiting
them to a particular distribution, or having to build fifteen
different images, it really looks like it works very well." -
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WyrATKUnmrS

The recipe script that generated it is linked there too, in case you
want to see how it was done and improve it. Using the recipe, it
should also be easy to generate an AppImage for 32-bit systems.

I have tested it on a couple of Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS versions.
Most likely it will run on others, too - and with some fine-tuning of
the recipe (i.e., bundling additional dependencies) on even more.
Probably the recipe is not perfect yet and might be missing some
stuff, but that should be relatively easy to fix.

If there is a continuous build system in place, this could be
integrated so that continuous/nightly/weekly images get built. Having
such builds should allow more users to run the latest bleeding-edge
version, test on multiple systems, and give earlier feedback. Of
course the AppImage format could also be used to distribute
stable/testing versions to users of most Linux distributions.

Is the Subsurface project interested in maintaing an
upstream-generated AppImage? Upstream packaging would have the
advantage that users/testers get the software exactly in the way the
upstream team intended, with the correct versions of the libraries
bundled together with the application. Just let me know what would be
needed to consider this for the project.

Regards
probono