Investigate build systems to compile what goes into AppImages

[probonopd]

Currently we are either building on CentOS 6 or use upstream-provided binaries. Building recent software on CentOS 6 can be cumbersome due to outdated dependencies. Hence we should investigate build systems that could make it easier to produce binaries that run on most distributions.

Holy Build Box

This is very close to what we are doing currently but using CentOS 5 rather than 6 for even greater compatibility of the resulting binaries. It might be complicated to get modern GUI software to compile on it however.

• https://github.com/phusion/holy-build-box Holy Build Box is a system for building "portable" binaries for Linux: binaries that work on pretty much any Linux distribution. This works by providing an easy-to-use compilation environment with an old glibc version.

Linuxbrew

• http://linuxbrew.sh Bottles are Linuxbrew's precompiled binary packages. Linuxbrew bottles work on any Linux system. They do however require glibc 2.19 or better. On systems with an older version of glibc, Linuxbrew will install glibc the first time that you install a bottled formula. If you prefer to use the glibc provided by your system and build all formulas from source, add to your .bashrc or .zshrc: export HOMEBREW_BUILD_FROM_SOURCE=1

Meson

• https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson
• https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/wiki/Creating%20Linux%20binaries "Creating Linux binaries that can be downloaded and run on any distro (like .dmg packages for OSX or .exe installers for Windows)"
• https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/wiki/Wrap%20dependency%20system%20manual The traditional approach to this has been to bundle dependencies inside your own project. Either as prebuilt libraries and headers or by embedding the source code inside your source tree and rewriting your build system to build them as part of your project. This is both tedious and error prone because it is always done by hand. The Wrap dependency system of Meson aims to provide an automated way to do this.

[shoogle]

It might also be good to investigate BSD compatibility. A universal Linux/BSD binary would be ideal, but if that's not possible then it would still be good to be able to create separate AppImages for BSD.

[probonopd]

Supposedly there is both FUSE and Linux compatibility so possibly AppImages could be made run there; I haven't experimented with it though.

[KDGNOR]

Sad Holy Build Box not supported for MacOS X 👎

but cool u know about Linuxbrew 👍