AppImage is a more flexible packaging solution for Linux than what
PyInstaller currently offers.
Some of the benefits are:
- Ability to ship the app with predefined environment variables
(solving issues like #321)
- Improved integration with the desktop environment (if you're using
go-appimage[1] or libappimage[2])
- Much lighter in size (~27 MB difference)
To actually make the AppImage, I'm using appimage-builder[3], which
makes the process a bit easier.
For more details about the AppImage technology, check out their
website[4].
[1] https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage
[2] https://github.com/AppImageCommunity/libappimage
[3] https://appimage-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
[4] https://appimage.org/
This fixes the following error when you launch the app with an emoji
font installed (e.g. Noto Emoji):
X Error of failed request: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error)
Major opcode of failed request: 139 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 20 (RenderAddGlyphs)
Serial number of failed request: 277
Current serial number in output stream: 300
This has been fixed[1] in libXft 2.3.5[2], but unfortunately Ubuntu
20.04 (which we currently use in the Linux CI workflow), still has
version 2.3.3, so we have to build it ourselves.
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft/-/merge_requests/12
[2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg-announce/2022-September/003209.html
This greatly reduces the final size of the UPX-compressed binary, from
78.7 MiB to 54.9 MiB (a 23.8 MiB difference)!
Co-authored-by: DevilXD <bartosz.peszek@gmail.com>
Because PyInstaller modifies the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable
to make things work correctly on Linux, when we try to launch any
subprocess (such as the web browser), that modified variable gets
picked up as well, causing things to go south.
To work around this Linux-only problem, we have to:
1. Save the current value of LD_LIBRARY_PATH
2. Move the value of LD_LIBRARY_PATH_ORIG to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
3. Launch subprocess
4. Restore the saved LD_LIBRARY_PATH again
Reference:
https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/runtime-information.html#ld-library-path-libpath-considerations
Co-authored-by: DevilXD <bartosz.peszek@gmail.com>
Because Linux distributions don't have an 'universal' path for the
system certificate store, bundling libssl built on distro A might not
work on distro B, because distros tend to change path to the
certificate store at build time.
This means that creating a PyInstaller package on Ubuntu will include
the libssl built there, and if you try to run this package on a
different distro (e.g. Arch Linux), any attempt to create an SSL
connection will fail, because Arch Linux has a different path for the
certificate store than Ubuntu.
This issue is usually worked around by bundling certificates with the
app (usually using certifi), and then pointing the SSL_CERT_FILE
environment to it.
However, truststore seems to be a better alternative, since it tries to
use the certificate store from the system instead.
The list of benefits are listed on the project's page on GitHub:
https://github.com/sethmlarson/truststore
On Linux, pystray's icon.stop() currently doesn't work well with the
AppIndicator backend.
So, instead of destroying the icon when the user restores from tray
(only to later re-create it when the user minimizes to tray again), we
have the option to control the icon's visibility instead! Luckily, that
works on Windows too!
Note that for this change to work properly on Linux, we need to switch
to the master version of pystray, because we need this specific fix:
https://github.com/moses-palmer/pystray/commit/5943ed4e19be48224cf39b70444de8ffe22c23ce
After pystray releases a version newer than 0.19.4, we can switch back.
Co-authored-by: DevilXD <bartosz.peszek@gmail.com>
guihkx