Arch Linux User Repository

A heads up for i3 dmenu users: it's not "cura", "cura-bin" or even "ultimaker-cura", it's "Ultimaker-cura" with a capital "U".

prurigro, I have no idea if there is any good reason not to, but if it could be changed to just "cura" or even "ultimaker-cura" without breaking anything on the next release for people who aren't using a DE or dmenu-desktop it would be fantastic. Regular dmenu is case sensitive unless you explicitly compile it not to be and I haven't run across another program yet that I had to try to remember to capitalize every time to launch it. Thanks for maintaining!

@xiota: I now have the AppImage extracted to /opt/ultimaker-cura, I'm using the built-in .desktop and icon instead of providing ones, and both Ultimaker-Cura and CuraEngine are available via CLI (CuraEngine actually allows you to script cura behaviour) . I'm also setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the opt directory so everything runs with priority given to included libraries.

Thanks for helping get the package going in a better direction! I've added you to the list of contributors at the top of the PKGBUILD :)

I actually like the idea of pre-extracting it, it makes being in /opt seem a bit more reasonable and sounds like it produces a more responsive result too. I'll look into doing that as well.

Thanks for the feedback and discussion!

For anyone interested, cura-5-bin extracts the AppImage into /opt/cura5. On my computer, the extracted package takes about 7.9s to load, while running the AppImage directly takes about 12.5s. The difference may be mounting and unmounting the squashfs filesystem to run the AppImage prevents its contents from being cached.

I think I agree with xiota. man hier says that /opt is for add-on packages containing static files. I think an app image basically meets that definition (it's a launcher with a squashfs file system containing all of its own libraries which it uses instead of the system libraries).

What joplin-appimage https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/joplin-appimage does is make a folder /opt/appimages and puts Joplin.AppImage there. It then creates a symlink for /usr/bin/joplin-desktop -> /opt/appimages/Joplin.AppImage and also extracts some specific, useful files from the app image and puts them in the correct spot (the LICENSE file goes in /usr/share/licenses, icons extracted to /usr/share/icons, etc.)

switchhosts-appimage https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/switchhosts-appimage does the same as joplin

todoist-appimage.git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/todoist-appimage does almost the same thing, but puts it in /opt/todoist/todoist.AppImage

A lot (maybe most) of the AppImages on AUR are packaged just like cura-bin is currently and splat the app image directly into /usr/bin/ as if it were a normal binary.

I definitely prefer the approach taken by joplin and wish all of the AppImages on AUR did things like that. You can look at how these other packages use the --appimage-extract argument to extract (and patch) the *.desktop file and images so you don't have to include your own.

I don't know of any standard re putting appimages in /opt, but appimages are nonstandard to begin with, so I think it would be good to put them somewhere that makes it clear they're atypical.

Maybe it would be better to extract the files as is normally expected of -bin packages?

@mstmob: Dependencies have been updated to include xdg-desktop-portal and I've added you to the list of contributors :)

@xiota: Are you aware of that being a standard AL convention? I'm hesitant to clutter up the /opt directory with a single binary that doesn't need a launcher, but would be willing to go ahead if it's recommended by upstream.

I'd like to request a few changes too:

• The start script /usr/bin/cura5 has permission 750, should be 755 to enable start by normal users.

• In the start script /usr/bin/cura5, change the last line to

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=xdgdesktopportal QT_QPA_PLATAFORM=xdgdesktopportal ./Ultimaker-Cura "$@"

see https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/issues/11856 for the reason why :-)

• In the .desktop file, please set Categories=Graphics;3DGraphics;Engineering; (currently only Graphics). These are the categories set in e.g. the PrusaSlicer. It helps people who have the additional categories reflected as start menu folder.

FYI, as I had issues with the normal appimage (bundled in this package), I created the cura-modern-appimage AUR package that seems to work better for me (and doesn't seem to require all the wayland and LD_PRELOAD hacks). If this package gets the modern image at some point, I'll deprecate my package.

Thanks for all the tips everyone- I'm camping semi-off-grid right now but will be back tomorrow and will look at getting this stuff resolved :)