Creating a general AppImage file for Gource

[JoshuaKimsey]

Howdy!

Recently I switched to using BazziteOS, an immutable atomic release (think SteamOS), as my primary Linux distro. Up until this point, I really hadn't been all that favourable towards them, but Bazzite changed my mind on how well they can run. It's been surprisingly less distracting to stuff I wanted to do than I expected, which is mostly a testament to the growing distro-agnostic nature of packages and apps for the Linux ecosystem.

That said, recently I wanted to do a Gource animation for a project I've been using, and I did run into an issue, since I couldn't really install the dependencies to build Gource on Bazzite and I couldn't really install it either. I got around this since Bazzite has DistroBox built in, so I just spun up a Debian container and installed Gource there to use it. But this got me thinking, since AppImages (a very general, universal package format for Linux) works fine from the Terminal when called like any other script, would it work for Gource too?

Well, I spun up an Ubuntu container, and with very minimal work got all the dependencies installed, plus a tool to build AppImages. I tried it with Gource and... It was a perfect success! It works exactly as it should when called from the terminal like a script: ./Gourcex86_64.AppImage. It generates the animations just the same and accepts the exact same arguments like the normal program does. Here is the Gource for Gource (Gource-ception!), made with the AppImage I built. :)

So with that said, I wanted to ask if there would be any desire to have the AppImage be included with the releases of Gource, along side the source code? There's not really a central distribution hub for AppImages, like there is for FlatPaks (which don't work well in the Terminal...) or Snaps (which only Ubuntu proper uses), so that's why I thought it might be best to have it be included with the Gource releases instead. It can be built using GitHub Actions, and I can get that workflow made for it if there is interest in this. The AppImage is quite small to have everything bundled together, ~8MB, so it wouldn't be unwieldy to deal with. It would be a nice way to ensure that all (or at least the vast majority) of Linux users have access to Gource, whether their distribution ships it or not, or if they can't build it on an immutable system.

I'll be curious what the thoughts are on this. I've attached the working AppImage for others to test out and see how it works for them. It should work exactly as expected, but it's always worth checking to see. Let me know what y'all think!
Gource-x86_64.zip

[JoshuaKimsey]

I went ahead and created the GitHub workflow to generate an AppImage for every release. I made a PR for that here: #336