xdg-app builds for gnome 3.20 are out

Finally there are now stable builds of the Gnome 3.20 runtime. I updated the Runtime wiki page  with details on how to install it.

This has been a long time coming, because this new runtime as well as the freedesktop.org runtime that it is based is built in a new way. It used to be built with a custom script, but now it uses the new xdg-app-builder tool. This makes it a lot cleaner and easier to maintain.

Also worth mentioning is the base freedesktop.org 1.4 runtime. This has been updated, modernized and cleaned up to make a great base both for applications that don’t need a lot of runtime support (such as games) and as a base for other runtimes. In fact, Alexei is using this as the base for the KDE runtimes too.

I have also set up a gnome-apps repository with stable builds of some Gnome 3.20 applications. This lets you test Gnome 3.20 applications on older distributions.

Documentation on how to install these can be found on Runtime wiki page , but as a teaser i give you the commands to test gedit if you have zero xdg-app setup:

$ wget https://people.gnome.org/~alexl/keys/gnome-sdk.gpg
$ xdg-app remote-add --user --gpg-import=gnome-sdk.gpg gnome http://sdk.gnome.org/repo/
$ xdg-app --user install gnome org.gnome.Platform 3.20
$ xdg-app --user remote-add --gpg-key=gnome-sdk.gpg gnome-apps http://sdk.gnome.org/repo-apps/
$ xdg-app --user install gnome-apps org.gnome.gedit stable
$ xdg-app run org.gnome.gedit

These runtimes will be a great base if you want to experiment with building xdg-apps, and going forward we will start looking at integrating xdg-app better into the Gnome development and release schedule.

Also, Endless Mobile are sponsoring Gnome with ARM hardware and people working on that, so I hope we can soon have official Gnome runtimes for ARM too.