Is it possbile to build appimages on a more regular basis

[triplus]

Likely once per day (build/deploy) makes sense.

P.S. I noticed on Launchpad:

Number of packages:
22 source packages (1.9 GiB)
361 binary packages (6.7 GiB)
Repository size:
8.6 GiB (100.00%) of 8.0 GiB

Time to delete old PPA builds? And as for some statistics:

A total of 12490 builds have been created for this PPA.

For perspective:

Posts.png (94.01 KiB) Viewed 1598 times

[sgrogan]

Time to delete old PPA builds?

This goes down after the pending builds are finished. We can probably delete the oce stuff. And precise but I try to delay.
We build Artful Aardvark 17.10, which is far from release. For Zesty 17.04 it identified some problems early.
For the large number of older binaries I don't know.

[blacey]

@triplus, @sgrogan, @saso, @kkremitzki and others - I have had a chance to explore extending @triplus' work to deploy the FreeCAD AppImage on Travis and have come to the following conclusions:

1. Generating and deploying the AppImage in the context of the current Travis CI jobs does not make sense because the AppImage recipe does not use the CI build artifacts and is dependent upon the daily PPA that is updated once per day.
2. The openSUSE OBS that @probono mentioned this past Saturday seems to be the best long-term solution and the OBS team is actively working on the FreeCAD AppImage builds. Once the FreeCAD OBS builds are working, we could add the OBS GitHub integration to the FreeCAD/FreeCAD repo so that each commit to master kicks of a new OBS AppImage build.
3. If there is strong demand for an interim non-OBS solution, I suggest that we use a separate GitHub repo (Strawman repo) that effectively contains a simple Travis config to generate the AppImage from the daily PPA, and deploy to the FreeCAD/FreeCAD GitHub repo releases section as we do for Windows and macOS. This solution feels like a mini OBS so it seems to me, that our time and energy might be better spent helping Adrian bootstrap the FreeCAD OBS builds and using the OBS GitHub integration service to trigger the AppImage updates and add hyperlinks to the AppImages in the appropriate places.

This is just my perspective so let the stones fly.

Cheers,
Bruce

[saso]

I agree, so will just stand next to you and take the stones

[triplus]

I am fine with both options as the result should be the same. That is to build and deploy development version of FreeCAD in AppImage format on Travis and to do that on daily basis. I see you have setup separate repository just for AppImage purpose. Caching file with time stamp in it step therefore isn't needed anymore.

As for the demand. Yes based on observations and feedback i would say the demand is there and it is growing. My main motivation to get involved was for @sgrogan not having to manually satisfy that demand. As in the original AppImage thread we said lets wait and see first if there is real demand before investing the effort in trying to automate the procedure.

The openSUSE OBS that @probono mentioned this past Saturday seems to be the best long-term solution and the OBS team is actively working on the FreeCAD AppImage builds. Once the FreeCAD OBS builds are working, we could add the OBS GitHub integration to the FreeCAD/FreeCAD repo so that each commit to master kicks of a new OBS AppImage build.

Hopefully that will happen and it would be nice if it would in some straightforward fashion. But i guess it could happen PPA/AppImage solution as we have it now could stay as a viable option for a while.

[blacey]

I am fine with both options as the result should be the same. That is to build and deploy development version of FreeCAD in AppImage format on Travis and to do that on daily basis. I see you have setup separate repository just for AppImage purpose. Caching file with time stamp in it step therefore isn't needed anymore.

As for the demand. Yes based on observations and feedback i would say the demand is there and it is growing. My main motivation to get involved was for @sgrogan not having to manually satisfy that demand. As in the original AppImage thread we said lets wait and see first if there is real demand before investing the effort in trying to automate the procedure.

The openSUSE OBS that @probono mentioned this past Saturday seems to be the best long-term solution and the OBS team is actively working on the FreeCAD AppImage builds. Once the FreeCAD OBS builds are working, we could add the OBS GitHub integration to the FreeCAD/FreeCAD repo so that each commit to master kicks of a new OBS AppImage build.

Hopefully that will happen and it would be nice if it would in some straightforward fashion. But i guess it could happen PPA/AppImage solution as we have it now could stay as a viable option for a while.

Ok, I have implemented option 3 and the first Travis AppImage deploy job just ran successfully and deployed an AppImage to FreeCAD/FreeCAD Releases. @triplus, can you test the AppImage?

@sgrogan, I did not configure AppImage pruning because I didn't want Travis to whack the earlier AppImage that you wanted to preserve. I can setup pruning to prune assets using a search string so we could rename the prior AppImage in some way so pruning will ignore it. Until we setup automated pruning, you will have to prune manually. Let me know what you want to do.

The time that a Travis cron job runs is based upon the time you configure the cron job and you can't change it so I will schedule the cron job late tonight PST so that we generate and deploy AppImages during low usage periods on Travis.

Feedback and pull requests welcomed

[sgrogan]

I like the separate repo, and not hosting the Recipe and the FreeCAD-nightly.yml ourselves.
Setting the cron to run late PST is great because I usually update the PPA evening EST and this will give time for the Launchpad builds to complete. Hopefully it will not drift too much because of time in the Travis queue.
I think this appimage will still be relevant even after The OBS builds are working because the libraries are likely to be different. OCCT7.1 in particular.
Thanks blacey

EDIT: @blacey I will re-name the old .AppImage tonight. I can code "old oce + netgen working" into it somehow and the FreeCAD version.

[triplus]

@triplus, can you test the AppImage?

Working properly.

P.S. https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/800

[sgrogan]

@blacey,@saso,@triplus
Thanks everyone, this seems to be working very well now.

Is it possbile to build appimages on a more regular basis

The answer is now YES

[gntech]

@sgrogan Thank you all very much! Awesome work