Re: Is it possible to have an offline Gambas Development Environment?

[gbWilly <gbWilly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, May 5th, 2025 at 11:09, Claus Dietrich <claus.dietrich@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> For various reasons I decided to setup and freeze a development
> environment at Gambas version 3.20.2 which doesn't require external
> resources and can be used offline.
> 
> So I generated a VM based on Mint 20.3 Mate which is not supported any
> longer and installed Gambas 3.20.2 from source on it. As next I wanted
> to have an offline help. So I activated the configuration switch for the
> offline help in the IDE which started the download of the help. The
> result was negative, because the offline help text is partially covered
> by other fixed white text and the contents is more or less useless. Have
> I done anything wrong?

I have no clue, for me off line help doesn't function. I just downloads foreve (I'm on 3.18.4). Online help in IDE is often in such small boxes that it is hard to read/use properly. But agin, I'm on 3.18.4 and run dark theme, that seems be part of the problem.

> As next I installed the AppImage Builder and generated a GnuPG signature
> key and had a look at the resources required for generating AppImages.
> It consists of the huge Ubuntu Repository at
> "http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu"; and the Gambas resource from the dead
> ppa ("http://ppa.launchpad.net/gambas-team/gambas3/ubuntu/";). Is there a
> way to replicate only those web resources, which are really needed as a
> local offline resource? Do I need a http server for it?

wget the repo's to a local system and host it from there yourself. Eliminate all you don't need, but be aware of possible inter dependencies if you do. The setup when downloaded can be used as is, for hosting using a http server. You can resign the repo using your own generated key, if you want to. Note that http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu will be a big one to pull in, so maybe you will need to be somewhat more selective in pulling the structure in. If you do that you will need to re-index the repo anyway. There are tools and some very basic documentation on how to set this up.

The whole structure can even be on the local system and set up as a file repository to pull form, so your sources.list entry would look something like 'deb file://path/to/repo main'. No http server needed in this case. The reference to above are internal to Gambas (I think), but could be hacked to point elsewhere I suppose somewhere in source code.

gbWilly