improve packaging/distribution

[DJCrashdummy]

i can't believe this wasn't asked before: 😳 how about releasing Structorizer as an AppImage or Flatpak? 🙏

beside making the handling for users a no-brainer, it would make packaging as a deb more or less obsolete... and with a Flatpak even automatic updates would be possible, on the other hand an AppImage would be a truly portable app (in a single file).
either way, it would cover a far wider audience in regards of distributions and skill level.

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i'm asking because my nephew starts to play a little bit around with programing (on a SteamDeck) and he - and his parents - are not that experienced with distributions, packages and software updates, so i have to supervise that a little bit... since Structorizer doesn't pop out a new release every week, it's not a big issue to keep it up to date, but still another (unnecessarily annoying) thing i have to think about.

[codemanyak]

Many thanks for your proposal. We have not indeed considered packaging Structorizer as AppImage or Flatpak by now, so we take it as a good occurrence to dive into this matter. There is plenty of discussion in the Linux community about the pros and cons of either approach in comparison to traditional package managers, of course. We will study the packaging process and the best practise recommendations.
Yet I do not regard the deb packaging as obsolete or neglectable in the near future. Enough Linux users continue primarily to rely on and confide in the classic package managing, be it inconvenient or not.

[DJCrashdummy]

i dove into this matter a little bit more in the last 1-2 years - especially from the viewpoint of a user but still with the technical details and FOSS in mind - and my conclusion was, that...

• for sure traditional packaging in general is not obsolete (and never will be), especially for system packages, little CLI applications and so on.
• but full fledged desktop applications (especially those who need constant updates or need to be the more or less the same version to successfully exchange data between different machines etc.) are a pretty good match for a Flatpak.
• AppImage is technically pretty cool and equally interesting for small CLI and big desktop applications, but somehow just a niche thing if you need a really portable app which has to work reliable under any circumstances.

all of them have also their own strengths and weaknesses:

• AppImage strength is its portability... you can even burn it on a read-only disk and start it from there, which makes it even physically impossible that your application is altered e.g. even if the system is infected with malware. - but their portability also causes their weakness: every AppImage ships their own dependencies, hence they are usually much bigger than other packages (which cumulates if you use them predominantly on your system) and although there is kind of a system for updates, i hardly have seen AppImages which get automatically updated (without any issues).
• Flatpak is IMHO the reasonable middleground: an update management which mostly works without any issues, dependencies (hence not that big in size) but still distribution independent and for most of the "immutable" distributions quite important. beside that it also uses isolation - which AppImage has not - which can still be a little bit rough around the edges for some special cases, but for 90% of the applications it's not an issue.
  the most noticeable difference for users compared to traditional packages (unless you are using a rolling distribution), are the fresh packages - ideally - directly form the developer, which can be good and bad... but if an application breaks, rolling back is easily possible.
• traditional packages via distribution repos can be quite stale, which can be good and bad (with all its implications like additional work multiplying but hence additional quality assessment). to circumvent that by having external repos will become tedious at the latest in case of an distribution upgrade or might even become an absolute mess if the user hasn't taken care of it properly. and to bypass that by only manually installing a package, adds the disadvantage of no automatic updates.

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so... a long story, short:
packagers of desktop applications get the most bang for their bucks with a Flatpak, an (additional) AppImage can be really nice to have depending on the use cases of the app, but still having traditional packages - ideally in the main repos of some distributions (usually i would focus on the ~3 biggest base distributions) - can add some additional benefits and take care of the traditionalists. 😉

-> so what i meant with my remark about the deb package might getting obsolete was, if there are just limited resources for packaging i would at least prioritize one of Flatpak or AppImage higher than a deb package.

thanks for considering that and sorry that my quick roundup got so long... but i thought i'll give you a jump-start. 😜

PS: on a "non-immutable" system you can for sure argue which application should be better installed via distribution packages and which via Flatpak... and sometimes i'm even debating this with myself. 🙃

PPS: yes, there is also Snap... but if you are really talking about that, you either must be kidding or simply not caring about anything outside of Ubuntu. 😒