Packaging an Electron Binary

Hey there,

currently I am busy packing an Electron app, which has no source code available. After a long painful time, I got it running with some binary patching. In some sense unfortunate for all my effort, @bennofs showed me how to get this running with little work by just making a wrapper script with the nix electron binary. As far as I understand it, this one works by just invoking electron on the ‘resources’ folder of the application.

My question here would be, which one the preferred way for nixpgks is here. The package this is concerning would be an update from GeoGebra 5 to version 6. Since they had ported the application from Java to Electron, it would be a complete repackage.

Have a nice day
voidless

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I’m not a Nixpkgs contributor, but let’s break the silence.

Actually, using Electron invoking is a common practice. Like, I’ve looked up for some cases, here are Element and Jitsi Meet.

The only concern is where do you get resources from. It should either fetch Git repo or download some binary package from a stable location. But I’m sure you’ve already resolved that.

So, the main point of packaging is: it should build and work on the most machines possible, and what’s underneath doesn’t matter. Thus, it would be fair enough to create your repackage under the name, like geogebra_6. Next, move old Java-based GeoGebra to geogebra_5, and link geogebra to the new version. This way everybody would have a choice to either stick with the Java version or use the newer one.

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