Hacker News Reader

Chip, thanks for sharing!

Could you have solved the same problem ("deploy apps with dependencies in a single file") using snaps? (snapcraft.io)

I think XARs are much simpler. snapcraft (and AppImage and other tools) seem to be much more invasive to the development flow and more opinionated about what the contents of the image look like (directory structures, yaml/xml/json files for metadata, etc).

XAR is much simpler. All it needs is a shell script (or raw executable) to run inside the XAR. Everything else is up to the bootstrapping. Note this isn't always a good thing -- opinionated software has its place. For what we use XAR for, though, having it "just work" with standard Python tooling without expecting open source libraries or modules or build tools behave differently is a strong plus.

AppImage only needs a shell script, which you can use to run whatever you throw at it (native, python, perl, ruby, java, wine, qemu...), the only difference seems to be it will use a compressed ISO instead of squashfs to pack the directory and later mount it with fuse.

Additionally and optionally you can setup a small .desktop file to provide some convenience metadata what will be useful to pack the app easily, and an icon file.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com