Is it possible to add examples on how to package a GUI application?

[sabbaghpierre]

Most of the CLI tools can be installed easily using cross platform tools such as Homebrew or Nix. However, getting GUI applications to work using those can be very challenging. I also tried Distrobox, but it doesn't really work well with the export tool function that they provide.

Having an example on how to package GUI applications would be really great, I tried packaging some apps that I want to use myself which do not provide a Flatpak or AppImage build, or apps that won't be accepted into the void-packages repo because of the repo's rules, but I deemed it too difficult since I am not very experienced.

Thank you for the tutorial that you're providing, it's a really great starting point!

[meator]

Hey, thank you for sharing your feedback!

Packaging GUI programs isn't usually all that different from packaging CLI ones. You just have to follow dependency requirements documented by upstream project and/or follow warning/error messages emitted by project's build system (this process is documented in several chapters of my packaging tutorial).

There are some things which are good to know if you are packaging GUI applications. For example, you should first figure out what GUI framework is the packaged program using, be it Qt5, Qt6, GTK, raw Xorg/Wayland programs, electron or something else. Qt programs usually use the qmake or cmake build systems, Qt5 programs usually require qt5-host-tools and qt5-qmake in their hostmakedepends, Qt6 programs usually require qt6-tools and qt6-base in their hostmakedepends, packaging electron programs should be usually avoided etc.

It might be useful to document these snippets of knowledge in the tutorial.

A good build system will tell you what programs/libraries are missing from the build environment, which will help you with determining correct hostmakedepends, makedepends and depends.

Also, you can always follow advice often shared by official Void documentation and other official sources to examine other void-packages templates for inspiration (I believe this is not a suitable substitute for beginner-friendly documentation, which is why I wrote this tutorial).

Linux packaging is very versatile. You have yourself mentioned several distribution-agnostic package managers & tools which can help with installing GUI programs not packaged by void-packages. Of the tools you have mentioned, Flatpak is the most relevant (it is often recommended by core Void Linux maintainers).

These alternatives have their drawbacks. For example, when I last researched it, I was unpleasantly surprised by Nix’s poor ease of use for both users and packagers, as well as its lacking documentation, error reporting, and debugging experience, especially in comparison to more traditional package builders such as xbps-src. Distrobox is just a collection of Bash script, which I find fragile at times (but Void boot process and package builder are also "just Bash scripts" for the most part). Flatpak's isolation isn't (in most cases) a substitute for proper isolation tools such as bubblewrap... and the list goes on.

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I will consider your request. I will first have to update the rofimoji chapter to reflect updates to dependency resolving made to xbps-src since I wrote that chapter (I didn't focus a lot of my attention to my xbps-src tutorial lately, because I was focusing on other projects and because I consider the tutorial to be fairly complete). I am still open to feedback though.