[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by frmald

Thankfully, the isolated install is good at touching nothing else but the target directory. OTOH, people don't want bare tarballs, so on top of FOSS software, there are various packaging / integration efforts. As you know, distro packages are hopefully outdated (perhaps because there is no "clean", package-able installation script, but who am I to judge).

Hi. I'm a distro package maintainer. The package I maintain for calibre is never outdated, as I update it every week when the new version comes out. See my signature.

Also, I am a contributor to calibre. I know a great deal about the installation scripts, because I wrote part of them. They're very clean and package-able, and I obsessively tweak them whenever I can make them even more clean and package-able.

You don't seem to know ANYTHING about how distros work, so I'll give you a hint: Debian unstable packages the very latest 5.7.2, but Debian's official release of Debian will never upgrade calibre, clean or not, because they are STABLE, and they define that as "does not change, for good or ill", and upgrading to a new version of calibre would constitute change.

I'm told most people like this "stable" thing. If they're not using Debian stable, they're using CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu, or Windows 7 (still), because they don't like the entire world changing every other week. Heck -- the official calibre guidance on updating says:

Originally Posted by the fine manual

There is no need to update every week. If you are happy with how calibre works turn off the update notification and be on your merry way. Check back to see if you want to update once a year or so. There is a check box to turn off the update notification, on the update notification itself.

Personally, my distro of choice adventurously chooses to upgrade every day, every time anything updates, under the philosophy that yes, you do need to occasionally adapt, and yes, the programs periodically change on you, but new things are fun to learn.

Originally Posted by frmald

First of all, WHAT desktop files? I had to write one by hand.

Yeah, well, that's exactly the problem, isn't it?

The one you "wrote by hand", with the comment "desktop file as seen in Debian", is the one which calibre's own code creates in src/calibre/linux.py, as invoked by either distro packaging (python setup.py install), or via /opt/calibre/calibre_postinstall.

Obviously, doing the isolated install does not try to write desktop files, shell completions, icon themes, etc. into the non-isolated /usr/share. Per your choice. So now, there are none to inspect.

Oh well. It's not like an appimage can own files in /usr/share/bash-completion/completions, and the appimage spec explicitly refuses to support multiple .desktop file entry points in one appimage.

...

Did you think Debian just invented the desktop file out of whole cloth?

Originally Posted by frmald

Most people don't want unsupervised installs (e.g. wget+sh), since you don't know what it does to your system, it provides no security in transferring the packages (wget+sh + MITM/hacked website etc) and it may pollute the filesystem with artifacts if the uninstallation fails (or is buggy).

I agree, and recommend you use:

wget URL -O installer.sh
less installer.sh
sh installer.sh

You then know precisely what it does, which sites it retrieves the binaries from, etc. \o/

Per https://calibre-ebook.com/download you may even manually verify the tarball it retrieves using the PGP signature from https://calibre-ebook.com/signatures, and manually untar it, then execute the calibre_postinstall program to set up system integration.

Originally Posted by frmald

MX Linux frugal-install here, with a zstd-compressed base (live) squashfs and btrfs+zstd overlays for home and root persistence. Had to hack the MX/antiX initrd for all this... But -- no need for Linux partitions, and the frugal directory, plus AppImage files, can simply be copied to other machines. I try to keep as many big apps out of the base squashfs, for upgradability and to be able to stay under the FAT32 4G limit.

I think your setup is sufficiently unusual that generally applicable needs don't map well to your specialized ones. If you're hacking your initrd and booting into a read-only squashfs root, and your sole interest in appimage is because it can extract overlays of the applications you use that don't have side effects on your squashfs root, then you'll be investing a darned lot of your time in repackaging applications for your use case, and, well, I wish you much luck -- but I still don't think this knowledge is very reusable for others.

Originally Posted by frmald

Anyway, thank you for your thoughtful input. It's getting annoying to deal with endless reCAPTCHAs on top of reCAPTCHAs for the same IP on this forum, so I doubt I'll be here much longer.

The reCAPTCHAs sound odd, I've never gotten a reCAPTCHA once in all my years of using this forum -- including the old days when I visited every single day for years, and the vast periods of time in which I abandoned the forum, then sporadically returned with gaps of up to a year.