Bundling Subsurface

Subsurface is an open source divelog program that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Subsurface can track single- and multi-tank dives using air, Nitrox or TriMix. One of the major strengths of Subsurface is its support of a wide range of dive computers.

An upstream-built AppImage is now available on https://subsurface-divelog.org/download/. This is great because it ships the software as intended by the upstream project. Over the past few weeks, I have been working with the Subsurface team to build an AppImage and during course of this, we stumbled into many subtleties that I assume a third-party packager would have been struggling with for a long time, if ever discovered at all. For me this is a good example why binaries should be produced by upstream projects.

A generic AppImage is available for download as Subsurface-4.5.2-x86_64.AppImage. You should be able to download this file, make it executable chmod +x Subsurface-4.5.2-x86_64.AppImage and then simply run this file. We are very interested in feedback regarding this way of distributing Linux binaries.

What is even more awesome is that the Subsurface project is producing daily builds of the development branch as well.

See the recipe script that can be used to generate the Subsurface AppImage from the upstream git source code using the cloud-based travis-ci continuous integration builds service here. You can also run the script on your local build machine.