Updater for deb format in Linux

[bright current]

Currenly tauri supports updater for Linux only for AppImage.
But AppImage works completly different from what tauri tried to achieve - it bundle everything into it and it makes it very heavy.
Also, AppImage doesn't work in some cases compared to deb which works pretty good even on multiple distros and even on arch based.

I think that it will be cool if tauri can support updater for deb in such a way that it will download the new deb file, request for password, exit, update, and relaunch 🙂

[slender quiver]

The thing is just that the .deb format is intended to be distributed using actual Debian customs, by e.g. uploading it to a PPA, so your users run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y to update the app, so a Tauri updater for .deb should really just be checking if there's an update then inform the user that they should apt upgrade to get it

It's possible for Tauri to download a new .deb file ofc, but requesting sudo on Linux is weird, especially since gksu was deprecated. Not sure how it could be handled in a way that's satisfying, or at least not as satisfying for the end users as just running apt upgrade

[bright current]

Maybe other formats can work? (I think AppImage needs to be excluded at all, from my experience it doesn't work a lot of times with other frameworks and very heavy)"
Also, think just about the updater with AppImage -- every update will be 100MB+

[slim siren]

Any ideas what "other formats" there are?

deb rpm pacman flatpak (via flathub) and afaik snap too all assume to be updated externally

and in the case of deb rpm and pacman also require sudo to do so

of course i'd love to see a more modular update approach where it doesn't depend on installers (similar to discord i guess) but i don't see that happening anytime soon if at all

[bright current]

I don't see problem in asking for sudo with the native program for that (I think it's called gksudo)

[slim siren]

i don't think that's reallyyyy reliable, is it?

[bright current]

That's the formats I meaned, I'll check if there's something else

[slim siren]

as-in, it may not exist on all distros

also, this feels so not linux-y 😅

[bright current]

I'm not sure, but I'm sure there's reliable way 🙂

[bright current]

I agree, tauri may be the first one who do it nice and seamlessly on linux. I hope there's already reliable way to use updater without the package manager

[slim siren]

It's Linux, there's never a reliable way for anything.

[bright current]

That's what I think too lol.
So, Tauri can be the first to do something outstanding in the field.

[slender quiver]

gksu/gksudo is deprecated and has been since I believe Ubuntu 18

It's no longer preinstalled, so using it would be another dependency to add

[slim siren]

yeah no, that wasn't my point. But doesn't matter, i'm not working on the linux bundler stuff (including the updater) myself anymore anyway so i don't really have a say in it anymore.

[slim siren]

totally forgot about that lol

it was replaced by policykit right?

[slender quiver]

I think so yea

Reliably asking for sudo permission to execute a .deb installation I think is currently only really available by opening a shady terminal window with the command prefilled, or something like that, which is super shady and not at all professional looking. And just downloading the .deb then instructing the user to install it is also not a good idea

Fundamentally .deb packages aren't meant to be auto updated, even if we figure out a way to pull it off it'd be to explicitly go against how they are intended to be used