Having multiple release artifacts per platform is a maintenance burden.
Furthermore, it is a maintenance burden that doesn't directly improve
the Nvim editor itself. The releases are meant to be a quick way for
users to try out and use neovim on their platform and was never intended
to be a buffet of releases for every conceivable setup.
Users are encouraged to the following replacements:
- Github action `action-setup-vim` to have neovim installed on their
PATH for their CI jobs. See https://github.com/rhysd/action-setup-vim.
- Use the appimage, either as is or by extracting it
- To use as is, run `chmod u+x nvim.appimage && ./nvim.appimage`
- If your system does not have FUSE you can extract the appimage with
`./nvim.appimage --appimage-extract && ./squashfs-root/usr/bin/nvim`
- Build it manually. See https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Building-Neovim.
Work on https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/22684
After some tweaks to our dep builds, we can now build a universal binary
for macOS by using `CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES`. So, let's do that. This
requires a number of additional changes:
1. We need to build on macOS 11, since earlier versions do not support
building universal (M1 + Intel) binaries.
2. We need to provision a universal `libintl`. The linker will look for
an ARM64 version of this library when linking the `nvim` binary.
While we're here:
1. Link statically to `libintl`. This allows to to avoid having to do
any install name rewriting or codesigning to package Neovim.
2. Bump the `MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET` to `11`. We're already using a
`libintl` built by Homebrew (through the pre-installed version of
`gettext`), and that is built for macOS 11.
In order to ensure we link to `libintl.a` instead of `libintl.dylib`, we
have to make sure that CMake can't find the latter. This ideally should
be a matter of doing `brew unlink gettext`. However, CMake is too adept
at finding things that Homebrew has installed (even when not linked), so
we have to do a bit more than that. This appears in the additional step
ensuring static linkage to `libintl`.
We end up breaking some Homebrew-installed software in the process, and
some of these software is called during our build (e.g. curl, git,
wget). To avoid any adverse effects, let's just uninstall them.
- Removed NSIS installer.
- Prevents undefined behaviour when two installations are performed to the same directory (NSIS + MSI).
- Reduced cost of maintaining two installers that do the same thing.
- Chose Wix MSI due to its better integration with Windows.
- Added Wix patch file to add neovim binaries to the system path during installation.
- Replaced neovim installer icons with better looking versions.
- Renamed neovim installer icons from logo.ico -> neovim.ico for all
icons to better reflect contents.
Addresses: #12571
- Added the following installers through CMake files:
- Windows NSIS.
- Windows MSI.
- Windows zip.
- MacOs tarball.
- Linux tarball.
- Linux Deb package.
- Tweaked pipeline CPack commands to build using new CMakeLists.txt configuration file.
- Added icons and relevant packaging files.
- Updated notes.md to reflect new installation instructions.
This isn't meant to be the perfect solution, it's simply a first pass at using a
simple packaging system to build Windows installers. A Debian package has also
been added since it's very easy but other packages have been left out due to
limiting the scope. Hopefully we can build further upon this and improve it
over time with code signing, better icons and more user-friendly installation
graphics and so on.
