Shrinking multi AppImages size tool

Developers
1

Suggestion: Make a shrinking AppImage tool by changing shared dependencies with other AppImages with links to a shared AppImage with the dependencies created by it.

A distribution only based in AppImages apps would be enormous.

It would be great to add a tool that would shrink the total space of AppImages, not repeating the shared libraries and its versions, perhaps changing files in AppImage with links, to an AppImage with the shared AppImages libraries.

Now that there are even Desktop Environments as Trinity as AppImage, making a distribution with a “normal” size or a little bigger as proof of concept of AppImage as a great way of liGnux software distribution would be a great marketing tool for this application package system,

Even better if it can manage several dependency versions at once, changing files with links inside images with the shrinking tool instead of having it all in each image - always optional, but offered by the system as default - .

And it is not the disk-space-saver, it is the future? FOSS multi AppImage shrinking tool to be able to have AppImage based distributions with a reasonable increase of size, by not having repeated dependency files in every image - as default option -.

2

Hi @mitcoes welcome to AppImage.

Once idea central to AppImage is “one app = one file”, no dependencies other than the base system (Linux distribution).

If we did what you suggested, AppImages would no longer “just work”. Hence we have decided early on that we do not want any dependencies than what can reasonably assumed to come with every Linux distribution in its default installation.

We do not want dependency management, package managers and things like that. We want “one app = one file” that works just about anywhere by a simple drag-and-drop. It is made with offline computers in mind that can’t “just download that dependency” as needed.

If dependency management and package managers are what you are looking for, then you should check out Canonical’s Snap format, which (like AppImage) is using squashfs files, and which (as you suggest) allows the concept of dependencies.

If we introduced what you suggest into AppImage, we would essentially re-create Snap.