Now the target CPU architecture should be set by the 'ARCH' environment
variable before invoking appimage-builder.
This makes it easier to build the AppImage for other CPU architectures.
This environment variable was necessary back then to work around a bug
in the libgtk3 version we include in the AppImage.
However, since commit 3897a8bccf
("ci/linux: build AppImage on Ubuntu 22.04 (Python 3.10)"), that's not
needed anymore, because Ubuntu 22.04 has a newer version of libgtk3,
which fixes the problem.
I made sure to verify the app runs as expected on Wayland sessions of
two major desktop environments:
- GNOME: 42.9 (Ubuntu 22.04.05) and 48.3 (Arch Linux)
- KDE Plasma: 5.27.5 (Debian 12) and 6.4.3 (Arch Linux)
An up to date version of libXft is still needed because Ubuntu 22.04
still has 2.3.4, which can cause the app not to launch if an emoji font
is installed on the host.
Unfortunately, sourcing the Python venv Bash script to activate the
virtual environment doesn't work while we're building the AppImage, so
this just manually invokes Pip from within the venv to install updated
versions of meson and ninja (for building PyGObject next), and then we
prepend the venv's "bin" directory to the 'PATH' environment variable
to make meson and ninja discoverable on the next "pip install" step.
This also removes "certifi" from being manually installed, because
"truststore" has been usable since commit
3897a8bccf ("ci/linux: build AppImage on
Ubuntu 22.04 (Python 3.10)").
appimage-builder is a tool that is not officially part of the AppImage
ecosystem, and lately its maintainer hasn't been able to keep up with
the latest AppImage ideas, most notably:
- The move to a new statically-linked runtime: Before this, all AppImages
using the old runtime, would depend on libfuse2 to be installed on the
host system just to be able to run out of the box. This wasn't much of
a problem back then, because libfuse2 was ubiquitous. However, nowadays,
some have distros don't even have it in their official repositories.
- The removal of the xz compression algorithm (used by default), and the
addition of Zstd.
Luckily, the problems above have been fixed in the git version of
appimage-builder, but a stable release is yet to be made, so we'll have
to use the git version, because other AppImage-making tools are not as
nice and convenient as appimage-builder.
This manually downloads the old AppImage runtime (now marked as
obsolete), to prevent appimage-builder v1.1.0 from failing to make the
AppImage.
The download URL appimage-builder v1.1.0 uses for the AppImage runtime
is hardcoded into the tool, and unfortunately it's been recently
removed, so this is merely a workaround, until hopefully a future
appimage-builder release fixes this.
See: https://redirect.github.com/AppImageCrafters/appimage-builder/issues/375
