It's a collection of scripts to build self-contained ( portable ) toolchains, userlands and packages for Linux/BSD/etc.
It uses pkgsrc along with some patches to the toolchain to allow you to natively build packages and/or toolchains into a unique prefix. It then (optionally) uses a patched AppImageKit to to create an AppImage out of the prefix.
While AppImage is a great piece of software, it's usual use case is to package an application that had been built into a standard location and tricking that application and its runtime environment into working in a different location.
It also seems to lack a general purpose solution for collecting all of the runtime dependencies an application might need, requiring per-package intervention from the package creator in most cases.
- Run a single binary on any linux kernel with fuse support.
- Isolate incompatible toolchain components such as libc.
- Building or running packages or entire collections of packages linked to musl and glibc on the same system.
- Distribute an application that can run on virtually all linux machines running today. Even non-modern ones.
- Building an application and ALL of it's dependencies is obviously slow.
- Pkgsrc doesn't currently support removing build-time dependencies without pkgin or -dev packages, resulting in a larger prefix
- Currently we have automated pruning of some basic things, but manual intervention is often required to slim the package down to the minimum.
Edit make.config to match your settings then run make.package --help for details.
- LLVM/clang, pcc and tcc toolchain support.
- Tarball install support (had it before, just need to add again)
- Cross platform support for BSD/OSX/Haiku/Cygwin etc.. (Only Linux is supported right now, and only x64 and arm64 have been tested)
- Support for creating install images of a base system for use as a full distribution with pkgsrc as the package manager.
- Better pruning for useless files in the prefix, and more re-usability for better compile times.