[chbot] Updating a program: which Way did I use to install it?

[Stephen Irons]

Specific problem solved: I installed MuseScore as an AppImage.

'file' and 'ls -l' told me that '~/.local/bin/musescore-portable' and 
'~/.local/bin/mscore-portable' were both symlinks to 
'~/.local/bin/Musescore-3.2.3-x86_64.AppImage'.

When you run 'Musescore-whatever' with the command-line option 
'install', it copies itself to '.local/bin' and creates these symlinks. 
When you run 'musescore-portable' with the command-line option 
'uninstall', it cleans up after itself.

Who knew?

Stephen Irons

On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 11:29, Stephen Irons <stephen at irons.nz> wrote:
> General grumble
> 
> There used to be a few packaging systems (deb, rpm, emerge, pacman, 
> etc), but each distribution chose Their Way and it was the Only Way 
> for that distribution. Of course, every thought Their Way was The One 
> True Way. But at least I knew how to update a package.
> 
> However, we now also have 'portable' packaging systems (AppImage, 
> Flatpak and Snap and probably others) which can be installed on any 
> distribution.
> 
> Then Python has its Way too (pip), and I see that I have at least one 
> Useful Program (youtube-dl) installed using this Way.
> 
> Some applications choose only One Way to release their software, so I 
> have to use that Way to install the software, so, in general, I 
> cannot settle on a single Way, even if there were a Preferred Way. So 
> now, the burden is on Me to remember which Way each application has 
> chosen.
> 
> Specific problem
> 
> I am trying to update Musescore to version 3.5.3 on Ubuntu 20.04. I 
> am using version 3.2.3. Approximately this version 
> (3.2.3-and-some-change) exists in the Ubuntu repos, but this is not 
> installed. I remember installing one of the portable versions when 
> 3.2.3 was the Next Best Thing, before it was available as a deb in 
> the repo. But I cannot remember which Way I ended up using.
> 
> Musescore makes new versions available as AppImage, Flatpak and Snap; 
> these eventually end up in the Ubuntu repo some month later.
> 
> When I auto-complete 'musescore' it completes as 'musescore-portable' 
> which 'which' tells me is '~/.local/bin/musescore-common'. There also 
> exists '~/.local/bin/mscore-common', where 'mscore' used to be the 
> name of the executable when people thought that shorter executable 
> names were better.
> 
> *** Does anyone recognise which Way would install a binary as 
> '~/.local/bin/xxx-portable'?
> 
> General questions
> 
> *** Is any one of these packaging systems (AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, 
> Python pip) significantly better or worse than any other? What are 
> the pros and cons?
> *** Are there any rules of thumb to work out which Way to update an 
> arbitrary program?
> 
> Thank you
> 
> Stephen Irons
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ourshack.com/pipermail/chchrobotics/attachments/20200825/e400deae/attachment.html>