today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 01, 2023

• Toolchains adventures - Q1 2023

  This is the seventh post in my toolchains adventures series. Please check the previous posts in the toolchains category for more context about this journey. There was no Q4 2022 report as there wasn’t really anything worthwhile to write about, only some usual Pkgsrc and OpenBSD toolchains related ports updates.

• Mastodon Account Verification with Ghost Blog

  I would like my profile to be clear that it's the real me, not some spammer pretending to be me. You achieve this with Mastodon verification: [...]

• AppImage Installer now using xdotool

  Also, there was a bug. ROX-Filer is supposed to have appropriate mime-handling for each AppImage. Fixed, now correctly extracts MimeType field from the .desktop file inside the .AppImage file.
  

  Added a new game, CroMagRally, and a paint program that is very good with graphics tablets, MyPaint.
  

  Thinking about what to do next with the Installer, I am concerned that it downloads and installs the latest AppImage from github. From my limited experience with AppImages, it would seem that a release may work now, but a later release may not.
  

  This potential problem is due, I think, to a lack in strictness of the rules required for constructing AppImages. A developer may release one, then later on update or change his host system, then when build the next release, it will be broken on EasyOS. This can very easily happen, and is a reason why I am not entirely happy with using AppImages.
  

  So, I am thinking of changing the Installer so that it downloads an AppImage release known to work, not necessarily the latest. Later on, the user can update to the latest, and if it doesn't work, can roll back.
  

  Note, as a precaution, I have been archiving them, so if one disappears, we still have it:
  

  https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/appimage/easyos/oe/kirkstone/

• AppImage Installer now parsing json file

  This morning I posted about using xdotool, to obtain the AppImage to download:
  

  https://bkhome.org/news/202303/appimage-installer-now-using-xdotool.html
  

  Before that, I had fiddled around with downloading a json file, but wasn't doing it right. Have now read up a bit more on the topic. For example, these sites: [...]