[EBUILD] Claude Desktop 0.9.1

[localtoast]

Hi all

Not sure whether this is really the right place to announce this, but 'Unsupported Software' definitely fits. Mods, if this isn't cool, please let me know.

I've been playing with Anthropic's Claude a lot of late, and was irritated to discover that there is no Linux native support for the Claude Desktop app. However, it turns out that Debian, Ubuntu, Arch etc have all managed to package it to run on Linux. As it turns out, it's an Electron app, which can be repackaged with a shim to make it Linux compatible.

I therefore decided to try an experiment: Could I use Claude to replicate the logic used in other distros' repackaging of the Claude Desktop app and write the ebuild for me?

tl;dr: Yes, I could, it's here: https://github.com/multidimensionalcats ... too-ebuild
Proper documentation is in README.md inside the files/ directory, rather than in the top level.


The experiment worked like this: I had Claude find, and analyze, the existing solutions for other distros, explain it to me, and then translate it into ebuild format. Claude figured out that it needed to fetch the Windows installer .exe, unpack it using p7zip (not sure about this as a decision, but I ran with it), use npx to extract the packaged app.asar, add a Linux-compatible shim for some Windows-specific functions mostly revolving around input and window management, and then repack app.asar.

During testing it ran into some problems because it expected my system to have Electron, npm and npx installed already, but it then correctly identified that the ebuild needed modifying to specify net-libs/nodejs[npm] as a dependency. It also, after some trial and error, gave up on trying to use any system implementation of Electron and decided to grab it via npm.

I have tested this on two different Gentoo machines and it worked pretty painlessly on both, however, I do not recommend assuming that this is a reliable or useful ebuild long-term. I am not particularly interested in maintaining it, and I very much doubt it's good or standards-compliant enough to submit for inclusion anywhere.

It's an experiment I did that produced something that might be useful to someone who wants a Gentoo-native way of running Claude Desktop in the short term, before official support starts, like I did.

[Banana]

Well, as you may already know, but gentoo has a policy about it:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.

This does not forbid any ordinary created ebuild for a software like that.

So, yes create an ebuild for it, but not with the help of AI

[localtoast]

Well, as you may already know, but gentoo has a policy about it:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.

This does not forbid any ordinary created ebuild for a software like that.

So, yes create an ebuild for it, but not with the help of AI

If this qualifies as contributing content to Gentoo, then please feel free to delete the thread - seems like I can't. I deliberately am not trying to get this thing included in any overlays, or the main portage repo, and this is another good reason why not. I genuinely just wanted to document a cool solution to creating a non-trivial ebuild that Gentoo doesn't have for now; not trying to break any rules. No harm, no foul.

[Banana]

You can do whatever you want and others can use your solution. There is no rule against it. Any official repo will not use it. Thats it.
And I do not see any reason to close or delete this thread.