[gentoo-user] Re: Running 3rd party apps intended for Ubuntu/RedHat

[Grant Edwards]

On 2018-08-21, james <garftd@×××××××.net> wrote:
> On 8/21/18 6:25 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:

>> There are a handful of 3rd party, closed-source apps that I run on my
>> Gentoo systems.  Often they're available for RedHat or Ubuntu,
>> sometimes for "generic" Linux.
[...]
>> I've been thinking about trying to automate this by installing the
>> app on an Ubuntu or RedHat system and then running a bash script that
>> uses ldd et alia to find and bundle up the set of required library
>> files. (How deep to recurse in the tree of library dependencies will
>> be a big question.)
>>
>> If I understand what containers are (never used them), it occurs to
>> me that if I bundle up everything all the way down to libc and
>> libgcc, I might as well be using a container, right?
>>
>> Is this a good use case for containers, or is there some other way to
>> do this?
>
> An alternative might be to use flatpak where applicable?
>
> https://flatpak.org/setup/Gentoo/

I've seen flatpack, but it seems to be intended for developers who are
building applications.  It wasn't at all obvious that it could be used
to package an application binary contained in a .rpm or .deb file.

I've also been reading up on appimage:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage

It too, is primarily intended for use by the application developer,
but I have found references to using it to package an existing app
that's available as a .deb or .rpm file.  The instructions a generally
thus:

 1. Create an AppDir that contains all of the executable, config, and
    library files needed to run your application.  This is apparently
    done by hand.

 2. Use some tool or other combined with some additional configuration
    files, to create an appimage from your AppDir.

But, once I've manually done step 1, that's all I need. Create a
tarball and Bob's your uncle.  For me, converting it to an appimage
subtracts value: it just adds additional layers of complexity.

-- 
Grant