When reporting a bug in some software it is often common that the developer asks you to check if the bug is fixed in the latest development version. This makes a lot of sense from the perspective of a developer that gets a lot of bug reports. However, unless you are very experienced with building software this is prohibitively hard.
This is an area where xdg-app shines, because it allows you to create binary builds of desktop applications that work on any distribution. In order to demonstrate this I set up an automated build system that builds Gimp and Inkscape from the development branch every day and produces a new binary that you can easily install and run:
To make it easy to use I also created packages of xdg-app for some common distributions.
For more information about how to use these builds, see the nightly builds page.
Works perfectly on Fedora 23. Great work!
Alex, thank you so much for making these builds available!
One question – you included a screenshot showing launchers in GNOME shell for these devel build apps… I followed the instructions on the live.gnome.org wiki that you linked to, but I don’t end up with launchers for them. The xdg-app command to launch them is hard for me to remember and launchers would be more convenient – how do I create them?
marin: They should show up automatically for you in the shell, once you logged in/out once after having installed the xdg-app package.
That’s completely off-topic, but where can I get this awesome wallpaper that you have? 🙂
Philippe: Its earth_from_space.jpg from the fedora desktop-backgrounds-basic package.
Impressive.
Works like a charm here on debian jessie.
I updated the wiki to fix wrong apt commands and multiarch warnings.
Étienne: Thanks.
Hi,
I am on fedora 23 , I installed xdg-app , after installing i tried the following command as normal user.
xdg-app install-app –user nightly org.gimp.GimpDevelGtk3
I am getting the following error:
error: While pulling app/org.gimp.GimpDevelGtk3/x86_64/master from remote nightly: Remote “nightly” not found
What do you think the problem can be? Same error is happening for GimpDevel
Regards,
Sajid Zaman
Sajid: That is weird, the remote called nightly should have been created from this part:
wget http://209.132.179.2/keys/nightly.gpg
xdg-app add-remote --user --gpg-import=nightly.gpg nightly http://209.132.179.2/repo/
Did you run that?
I’ve added an xdg-app package to Mageia Cauldron (equivalent of rawhide).
Olav: Can you update the wiki page with this info?
Hi Alex, thank you for this fantastic overview!
I installed GIMP nightly a few weeks ago on Fedora 22, now if I try to install InkscapeDevel I get a 404 error:
~ LC_ALL=C xdg-app install-app –user nightly org.gimp.InkscapeDevel
error: While pulling app/org.gimp.InkscapeDevel/x86_64/master from remote nightly: Server returned status 404: Not Found
Any suggestions to get it working again?
Of course, I saw the error in my command right after I submitted the comment, it should be org.inkscape.InkscapeDevel and it works nicely. Sorry for the unnecessary noise here… :-/
Hi. These are really handy, thanks for making them. However the current GIMP version says it is from commit ccd8ec5, which I think is a few weeks old ( https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=ccd8ec5 ). Will you be updating them. Thanks.
sam: Seems the new builds fail because libmypaint is not in the build. I’ll add it.