Distinction between linuxdeploy and appimagetool?

Creating AppImages
1

Sorry for asking newbie questions.

As far as I know
appimagetool is the tool creating AppImages


and
linuxdeploy is designed to be an AppDir maintenance tool.

However, it seems I can just use linuxdeploy with its plugin to create a AppImage file.
e.g.
./linuxdeploy*.AppImage --appdir AppDir --output appimage

appimagetool seems has nothing to do.
when should I use appimagetool?

Besides, I was wondering why linuxdeploy skips those runtime libraries (such as /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6)
when deploying dependencies

Thanks

2

Tools like linuxdeployqt and the linuxdeploy AppImage plugin come with and use appimagetool as a lower-level tool under the hood to convert the generated AppDir to AppImage. Unless you are doing very special things, there is usually no need to operate appimagetool directly.

See https://docs.appimage.org for the packaging guide.

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3

@probono
Excuse me. Would you please help me to figure out linuxdeploy does not package core library.
I have read the wiki page about creating appimages that are compatible with many systems.


and I notice that linuxdeploy does not package core library such as libc.so.6, libstdc++.so.6, etc.

I would like to know why not to package them.

Thank you. You guys did awesome works.

4

This is intentional. Why would you want to package them? They are part of every Linux target system, and we are not packaging them in order to make the resulting AppImages less “bloated”.

For more information, please see https://docs.appimage.org/introduction/concepts.html.

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