Idea: use AppImage as a bundle output format

[windelbouwman]

Hi,

Just wanted to pitch the idea of bundling a ROS application into an AppImage file.

In nutshell an AppImage is a squashfs with a runtime prepended to it. This allows executables, python scripts and resources to be bundled into a single file (the robotic application). This single file approach has several benefits:

• easy side by side testing two version of an application
• easy transfer to a target system (scp/ftp the file)

The workflow would be:

• compile ros code with colcon
• Construct AppImage from install folder
• Run the bundled ros application

Regards,
Windel