phantop / appdwarf Goto Github PK

Interesting!

Would you think this is something a future version of the AppImage file format should consider to take advantage of?

It would be nice if the bash script would be replaced by a ELF executable binary in order to remove the dependencies on tools that may not be there, e.g., on FreeBSD (admittedly an edge case but hey, AppImages can run there thanks to the Linuxulator in FreeBSD).

FreeBSD% chmod +x /tmp/java
FreeBSD% file /tmp/java 
/tmp/java: POSIX shell script executable (binary data)
FreeBSD% /tmp/java 
/tmp/java: md5sum: not found
/tmp/java: [[: not found
/tmp/java: /tmp/dwarf_java/AppRun: not found
/tmp/java: fusermount: not found

/home//Zettlr-2.3.0-x86_64.sh
/home//Zettlr-2.3.0-x86_64.sh: row 6: /tmp/dwarf_Zettlr-2.3.0-x86_64.sh1a3b6/AppRun: No such file or directory

OS: Fedora 36
Package: Zettlr
Where is found: local in /home/*****/
Running the script: by user (no root)

So, even though dwarfs is arguably the very best at what it does, it's not really known or popular. Meaning, an AppImage using it can't really be published as is because most people won't be able to use it.
Now, what about a minimal squashfs image containing a portable version of a barebones dwarfs install, appended to the actual image of the program contents? That just might do.
The idea is to first execute dwarfs like a normal AppImage and use it to mount and execute the program transparently to the user.
Thoughts?

how do I use it ? let's say I have an appdir and inside has an apprun how do I use appdwarf to compress it and turn into a dwarf executable file?