can a release be made ?

[rofl0r]

i've seen the sourceware git repo is still active. since the last insight release 6.8.1 is ten years old, it'd be nice if finally a release could be produced, since it's awkward to pull git repos with submodules for distro build recipes, also to run autoreconf via the build script. it's much nicer to have a release tarball where all this is included.

on another topic, i managed to get 6.8.1 to build, however when i start it it complains about:

Tcl_Init failed: Can't find a usable init.tcl in the following directories: 
    {} /share/tcl8.4 /library

i do have have tcl 8.6 installed though and the FAQ here https://sourceware.org/insight/faq.php#q-2.4 mentions environment variable TCL_LIBRARY, so i tried:

$ TCL_LIBRARY=/lib/tcl8.6 insight myprogram

which results in

Tcl_Init failed: Can't find a usable init.tcl in the following directories: 
    /lib/tcl8.6 {} /lib/tcl8.6 /lib/e/tcl8.4 /share/tcl8.4 /library

/lib/tcl8.6/init.tcl: version conflict for package "Tcl": have 8.4, need 8.6.4
version conflict for package "Tcl": have 8.4, need 8.6.4
    while executing
"package require -exact Tcl 8.6.4"
    (file "/lib/tcl8.6/init.tcl" line 19)
    invoked from within
"source /lib/tcl8.6/init.tcl"
    ("uplevel" body line 1)
    invoked from within
"uplevel #0 [list source $tclfile]"
/lib/tcl8.6/init.tcl: version conflict for package "Tcl": have 8.4, need 8.6.4
version conflict for package "Tcl": have 8.4, need 8.6.4
    while executing
...

do you happen to know how this can be fixed ?

[antony-jr]

@rofl0r I've made a AppImage for this purpose, pre-built binaries for the latest commit can be found here.

Quick Start (No Installation Required or Building, even works in live boot)

 $ wget "https://github.com/antony-jr/insight/releases/download/8180966/Insight-x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-8180966-x86_64.AppImage"
 $ chmod +x Insight-x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-8180966-x86_64.AppImage
 $ ./Insight-x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-8180966-x86_64.AppImage

[rofl0r]

@antony-jr that's laudable, but i do not run other people's binaries on my machine; also i'm looking for bundling this in my source-based distro.

[antony-jr]

@antony-jr that's laudable, but i do not run other people's binaries on my machine;

@rofl0r Actually it's built on Github Actions(CI/CD, the logs are public. I can only say it does not contain any exploits, if you are concerned you can run it in Firejail) but if you prefer not to use AppImages then it's fine.

also i'm looking for bundling this in my source-based distro.

AppImages uses FHS so you could get a idea on how I bundled it. itk3.3 package is only available in Ubuntu Trusty which was LTS but dropped. You need itk3.3(that specific version which is found in trusty, I tried to compile this specific version from source but it's a bit hard or I'm doing something wrong. Also the TCL libs are hardcoded you need to patch like how I did -> https://github.com/antony-jr/insight/tree/master/patches (look into all patches relating to itcl, itk and tcl8.6 and tcl8.5)

[antony-jr]

To extract a AppImage and view it's contents you could use the argument --appimage-extract

[rofl0r]

even if i wanted to run the app image i couldn't because of AppImage/AppImageKit#1112

(look into all patches relating to itcl, itk and tcl8.6 and tcl8.5)

ah thanks, that could be what i need (if the author keeps on refusing to create a release)

[antony-jr]

even if i wanted to run the app image i couldn't because of AppImage/AppImageKit#1112

musl support is still a bit complicated. Also the insight pre-built binaries are from Ubuntu Xenial so it's not going to run in alpine linux.