PlasticSCM AppImage Packaging Utility

June, 2022

This repository contains scripts to package Plastic SCM's Linux client as a portable AppImage.

This script can also optionally be used to install/uninstall the resulting AppImage.

The intention here is to provide a "one-click" install alternative to wrangling Plastic SCM's dependencies on modern distros.

How it works

This utility pulls the Ubuntu 18.04 docker image and then downloads, extracts, and repackages the Plastic SCM clients and all dependencies using AppImage's pkg2appimage tool. See https://github.com/AppImage/pkg2appimage

Prerequisites

You only need access to a Linux machine with Docker on it to build the AppImage.

Once built, the AppImage is a standalone program that has no dependency on docker.

If you've never used docker, basically you just need to install it via your system's package manager, and then add yourself to the docker group. Log out, log back in, and you should be ready to go.

Usage

TLDR; Build and Install

$ git clone https://github.com/ahrbe1/plasticscm-appimage.git
$ cd plasticscm-appimage
$ ./build-appimage.sh --install

Will build the AppImage and install it for you. The build will take a few minutes to download and package everything. Once built, the script will install the following files:

• AppImage -> ~/.local/opt/
• command-line tools -> ~/.local/bin
• .desktop files -> ~/.local/share/applications
• icons -> ~/.local/share/plasticscm/icons

Uninstall

$ ./build-appimage.sh --uninstall

Build Only

$ ./build-appimage.sh

The resulting AppImage can be found in the out folder.

$ ls out/*.AppImage
out/Plastic_SCM_Client-11.0.16.7195-glibc2.25-x86_64.AppImage

Program Usage

$ ./build-appimage.sh -h
usage: build-appimage.sh [-i|--install] [-u|--uninstall]
         [-p|--prune] [-h|--help] [-v|--version]

options:
  -i|--install    install the application
  -u|--uninstall  uninstall the application
  -p|--prune      run 'docker image prune' after build
  -h|--help       show this help text
  -v|--version    show version information

No modifications are made to your system unless --install, --uninstall, or --prune are used.

Command Line Tools

The build now exposes the command-line tools as well as the GUIs. If you chose not to do an automatic install, you can manually create the following symlinks to the AppImage and it will autodetect which tool you want to start:

• cm
• gluon
• gtkmergetool
• gtkplastic
• legacygluon
• legacyplasticgui
• plasticgui
• linplasticx

As an example:

$ sudo cp Plastic_SCM_Client*.AppImage /opt/
$ mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
$ for cmd in cm gluon gtkmergetool gtkplastic legacygluon legacyplasticgui plasticgui linplasticx
  do
    ln -s /opt/Plastic_SCM_Client*.AppImage ~/.local/bin/$cmd
  done

Be sure to add ~/.local/bin to your $PATH (e.g. in ~/.bashrc)

Then you can use those commands to start the relevant tools from the AppImage.

Limitations

You will need to rebuild the AppImage when new versions of the Plastic SCM utilities are available.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome to fix bugs or add capability. File a ticket if you bump into issues and I'll see what I can do.

License

The Unlicense, https://unlicense.org