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52 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
appdwarf
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=======
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A tool to convert an AppDir or an existing [AppImage](https://appimage.org/) file,
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either as a local file or from a URL, into a highly compressed portable image using
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[dwarfs](https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs).
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This is a small script and the bulk of the work is in the original `dwarfs` project,
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so all credit deserves to go there. This script has not been extensively tested so I
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cannot guarantee it will function without issue.
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## Requirements
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In order to create the images, you will need:
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- [dwarfs](https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs), specifically `mkdwarfs`
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- This may in turn require further dependencies, and specifically relies on the presence of FUSE for mounting images.
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- `dwarfsck` and `dwarfsextract` also allow for converting existing dwarfs images and updating the header of existing appdwarfs
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- squashfs-tools for AppImage conversion
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- `zstd` for creating or running `zzexe` files
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If you only wish to run an existing appdwarf, only `dwarfs` is needed in PATH.
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## How to create an appdwarf
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`appdwarf` can take both AppImage files and extracted AppDirs as input. If a file
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or folder is not found, `appdwarf` will also accept direct URLs to AppImages, links
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or names to GitHub repos with AppImages in their releases page, or names of programs
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that meet the GitHub criteria on AppImageHub. Any files that are found but are not
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AppImages will be compressed using `zzexe`.
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The apps folder contains other scripts for specific programs that will download all
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necessary files and create a resulting appdwarf in the `bin` subfolder.
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## `zzexe`
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`zzexe` is a small tool similar to `gzexe` that instead uses zstd to compress single applications.
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I've included it because it has a similar goal to `appdwarf` on the whole, just on a smaller scale.
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I wrote it in part because I felt that `gzexe` was overly complicated, as I had been
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using lightly modified version of it that replaces `gzip` with `zstd`, and to add a
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couple additional features:
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- supports adding in a prefix command to the file using the `-p` option
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- e.g. `zzexe -p wine some.exe` will generate a compressed file that will then run the exe with wine
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- automatically appends the extension of the source file to the temporary file
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created when ran since some programs care about that, such as an emulator only
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running games of an expected file extension.
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*As of June 2022, `zzexe` has been integrated into the main `appdwarf` script.
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I have implemented a heuristic that should automatically detect regular files and
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run `zzexe` on them, however you can directly invoke it with the `-z` option.*
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