Release Engineering

Thanks - Raal to report this. I wasn't aware of the 404s on the download links from the official webpage.

Let me add what I know about the issue, what I did lately in my spare time and where I would like to bring that side of the project to.

On the official support topic, I think the ESC was quite adamant: if the AppImages are to be an officially supported format, a team of people capable of doing QA, security testing/assurance and documentation on the specific builds has to be present, which I think we cannot fully provide even with community efforts (I hope to be proved wrong :) ). This is surely debatable (as actually the AppImages are re-packaged from .deb releases - so part of the effort is already covered somehow), but still holds true in my perspective.

I was recently in contact with Antonio Faccioli, Italian member of TDF which was the maintainer of the website libreoffice.soluzioniopen.com and the AppImage releases. He said he sadly doesn't have the time anymore to continue working on the AppImage and even to maintain the website. As part of LibreItalia (the italian association that collects italian members of TDF and people into LO and FLOSS) Board of Directors and agreeing with the other directors there, I offered him to host the website on LibreItalia's infrastructure and we recently moved the site there, with all previous releases. Domain is still his, but he can manage to change the DNS pointers quite easily, if we need to.

What I was doing, even before that and on some VPSes that I bought for my personal purposes and enjoyment, was to try to get to a more automatic release flow. I managed to automatically produce AppImage releases of recent LO that are available here: https://appimage.sys42.eu
What happens there is that about an hour after the official release of .deb packages, the thing produces a fixed (but indeed not complete as Antonio's one) set of AppImages with a couple of hours of delay (that happened basically since April without any flaws, IIRC). The builds are definitely not thoroughly tested, but some fellow users confirmed to me at least the "basic" builds work flawlessly.
I'm doing it using a port to python of Antonio's own buildscript (that are, for the moment, published here: https://git.sys42.eu/syntaxerrormmm/loappimage-helpers - sorry for comments in Italian) and some parsing of the official download page of LO. Additionally, I'm managing the automatic timing of the build with a Rundeck instance.

What I intended to do (and failed to do yet, still) was to "migrate" what I have done to be in the hand of LibreItalia on its own infra (and not on my premises), basically migrating the python package repo, Rundeck and the storage space to LibreItalia's VPSes. I'm pretty sure also the naming of the AppImage files has to be amended to follow the same pointers from the official website - I still have to put a hand on it. Also, implementing daily builds would be much more helpful to QA, for example (and that could take relatively low efforts and Python skills).

What I would much appreciate - and in case, happy to share accounts and accesses to the required resources - is a help to maintain the build system and/or the libreoffice.soluzioniopen.com website, the latter being possibly optional - if we can change pointers from the official website and/or amend the build outputs.

Of course, I am available to discuss any of the points I had so far introduced - and happy to have more people interested in maintaining the format :)

I've updated the links on https://www.libreoffice.org/download/appimage/ accordingly.