What changes are in an appimage?

Posted by Annabel on 2025-01-12.

Recently I created issue #396, Aurelien fixed it, thanks, and this led to Commit cf52835. I tried to see if this led to any mention of the next appimage, but didn’t spot anything, and in any case I have little familiarity with github. (Also the issue mentions “0.1” so maybe this change is some way off being built in?). So: Is there a way to see when a change will go into an appimage, or how to see what changes are in the current appimage?

Replies

Aurélien Pierre — 2025-01-12

Ok, so here is how it works:

1. You can see the history of commits there: https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/master/ 
2. The AppImage and Windows build have an uniform naming pattern. For example, for tonight’s package, it’s Ansel-0.0.0+1028.gecaf9d6f-x86_64.AppImage. 0.0.0+1028 means we are 1028 commits after version tag 0.0.0. Then, gecaf9d6f means “Git ecaf9d6f”, where ecaf9d6f is the last commit that was included in the AppImage.
3. Find that commit ID in the commit history:

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So this is the step at which the package was built. Every commit older than this one will be included in the package.

Or… the packages are nightly builds, auto-built everyday around 1am UTC. Meaning anything that got commited the previous day gets included.

Annabel — 2025-01-12

Thanks, that’s very clear. I’m impressed by how many changes you do each day.

Aurélien Pierre — 2025-01-12

Well, don’t be. I keep changes minimal and focused on one single topic. That’s a trick to be able to go back anytime in the history of commits, if a bug or a regression appears, and find precisely what commit introduced it. Splitting changes into small steps makes that easier, and makes the number of changes more impressing, but it’s an illusion.