I would like to suggest an extension in the descriptions the widget «About» provides.
To report bugs, or to suggest improvements, etc., the maintainers like to know which version of Avogadro was used. Speaking for the Linux AppImage I use in Linux Debian, because of the «About» widget (for now) constantly reports 1.97.0
my approach (so far) was to report the md5sum of the AppImage.
The computation of a checksum however might not be available by default / may be foreign to users of other operating systems (users of Windows). Second, though allowing an identification, it will not establish an easy link between the compiled executable source code, and the commit history the developers interact with.
Hence my suggestion is to add to the widget a time stamp and git’s checksum about the last change of the source code; possibly, the short one of 7 alphanumeric characters (as e.g. used in GitHub’s web pages listing the commits) would be just fine. Equally, easy access to these two information and comparison with the project’s GitHub page would offer the user a mean to justify an update of the local installation.
As an example of implementation, below a screen photo of the «About» widget of CrystalExplorer, a program to analyze intermolecular interactions in crystal structures:
So far, I’m not able to replicate the screen photo including the AppImage for Linux in Debian 12.
My backups still include a nightly binary as provided from the GitHub landing page, fetched on 2023-01-13 as Avogadro2.AppImage.zip which solely contains Avogadro2-x86_64.AppImage. This old version does not show (yet) more than “Version 1.97.0”. On the other hand, accessing the same page today yields a reorganized download Avogadro2.AppImage.zip of Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux.sh, Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux.tar.Z, and Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux.tar.gz. With 6 MB, the volume only is about a tenth of the AppImage by January.
Though running the bash script reports Unpacking finished successfully, the subsequent attempt to launch the new executable in path of /Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux/bin fails
$ chmod u+x ./avogadro2
$ ./avogadro2
./avogadro2: error while loading shared libraries: libAvogadroQtOpenGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
@ghutchis Thanks to an entry on mattermodelling.se, I notice the new page in preparation how to install Avogadro2 equally contains nightly builds for Linuxes (at present, the landing page does not discern AppImage vs nightly built/updated AppImage).
Please note: In a test download, the nightly update from this source new to me however equally yields an archive which does not contain an executable AppImage, but Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux.sh, Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux.tar.Z and Avogadro2-1.97.0-Linux.tar.gz instead for much less than 10 MB of data in total.
