Please add Linux AppImage builds in the staging automated builds

[bugnano]

As I don't like compiling apps from source, it would be great to be able to download the latest build as an AppImage. For the moment only Windows binaries are provided, but as I remember that the CI is already configured for building AppImages for other actions, it would not be too hard to add AppImage as a build artifact of the staging automated builds. Also, it's been more than 1 year since the last official release, and it would be great to have more frequent releases, given that this project sees very active development.

[equalsraf]

Hi @bugnano,

What distro are you on? Are not packaged there yet?

A new release is coming. And I agree we should release more frequently, but this release time is usually proportional to how big the changes we made were.

[bugnano]

I'm on Fedora 38, and the package version is 0.2.17, so my problem is not that a version of neovim-qt is packaged, but it's that a version that old does still contain some bugs that I reported months ago and were fixed, but not released yet.

Please consider not only new features for planning a release, but also bug fixes, no matter how small you think they are, they still matter very much to your users.

[bugnano]

Friendly ping for making a release, even if it doesn't have all the features you want (but it has the bugfixes I need) :)

[jgehrig]

@equalsraf

This should be an easy fix, right? We have Linux AppImage and MacOS DMG packages associated with each GitHub WorkFlow build already.

Are the staging builds here automated or manual?

Is there a script we can update to include some additional resources for MacOS and Linux users?

[jgehrig]

@bugnano

Even though Linux AppImages are not included in the staging page, you can still easily download them.

It sounds like you may already know this based on your first comment, but I'm including some instructions here just in case.

Instructions for AppImage download:

1. Navigate to the commit history page
2. Find the commit you want an AppImage for
3. Next to that commit there is a small check or cross icon, click it
4. Click 'Details' for any of the 'Build and Test' checks
5. Click 'Summary' in the left pane
6. Scroll down to 'Artifacts'
7. Download 'MacOS_Release' or 'Linux_Release'

The build artifacts do expire after some period of time, so we should still add these images to staging.

Here is the latest commit, at the time of this comment.

This process can be used for Pull Request commits too.

[bugnano]

It would be awesome to release an AppImage with the release of a new version as well. For example, on Fedora 39 neovim-qt is packaged at version 0.2.18, which is fantastic, but on another machine that I use that has Ubuntu 22.04, the neovim-qt version there is still at version 0.2.16. Releasing an AppImage would allow me to use the latest version regardless of the OS.

For the moment it's still possible to grab the AppImage from the GH Actions, but once the artifacts expire, I'll no longer have any means of getting it.