Evaluate Briefcase's Linux system packages

[abdnh]

Briefcase supports building Linux system packages for a few distributions. Anki traditionally didn’t offer standard packages officially, but if we can get that now for free or with minimum effort, it’s worth considering supporting that.

References

https://briefcase.beeware.org/en/stable/reference/platforms/linux/system/

https://github.com/beeware/briefcase-linux-system-template

[abdnh]

I only tested the Debian package on Ubuntu. If someone is interested in testing other distros' packages, that would be appreciated.

[abdnh]

Briefcase can use Docker to build packages for different distributions easily, but I think we'll need to preserve custom install.sh/uninstal.sh scripts for more flexibility.

[abdnh]

Something to keep in mind for Linux packages generally is to look into the minimum glibc version we can support: #4167 (comment)

It looks like we need to build using an Ubuntu 22 GitHub runner or pass --target debian:12 to Briefcase.

[abdnh]

I overlooked the fact that Briefcase uses the system's Python installation on Linux, so it's unfortunately more work to support different distros. We should probably use --target to build multiple packages for a number of distros with different Python versions.

[abdnh]

--target works nicely. The question now is what distros/versions/architecture combinations to support.

As an alternative solution, it might be worth investigating using PyInstaller for packaging Python and dependencies then passing the output to Briefcase as an external app: https://briefcase.beeware.org/en/stable/how-to/building/external-apps