One thing to consider, which might make my whole idea not a good idea, is that AppImages are read-only, so they might not be a good fit for an IDE with built-in Python. How would the user install new packages? Could we target a site-packages folder outside the AppImage? I don’t know.
An alternative to the AppImage strategy could perhaps be a bash script that installs everything we want. Currently Thonny provides this: bash <(wget -O - https://thonny.org/installer-for-linux) (the running bash source)
Update: I asked a friend who is very good at bash scripts to have a look…
Good point. If the AppImage is read only and the user could not install packages, I would guess that Thonny would give a strange error when the user tried to install something because a read only package jar would be completely unexpected.
How does Thonny package itself? Doesn’t it come with installed packages already? Why can’t we add our own package that adds a few more? It is open source after-all.
For the MacOS “Thonny + py5 bundle” I guess this is the way forward (following instructions on that link I posted in the first message).
For Windows, the portable zip seems to be mostly working.
Then for Linux, packaging to different distro ecossystems seems lots of trouble, so I thought about the AppImage strategy, but now I’m more inclined to try to hack the bash script, which is already installing stuff.
Interesting. I just went through the packaging directory in the Thonny repo.
It seems achievable, and the team does respond to questions. I don’t think we’d need to worry about multiple LInux distros. They don’t seem to do anything special for that for their own releases: