Linux @lemmy.ml adONis @lemmy.world 4 mo. ago

Is it just me, or is packaging for Flatpak a nightmare?

I'm trying to package and publish a tool I've been working on, but for the life of me, I'm struggling with Flatpak.

It's a wails app, that relies on webkit2-4.0 and some additional libraries that are not present in any of the Sdks I'm using. (javascriptcore, etc...)

To get those libs, I tried building the app AND webkit itself against the specific platform. But since webkit takes such a long time to build, I'm running in circles.

Welp.

21 comments

I've been trying for a while, looking up other manifests helped me but I'm still lost on a few things. Maybe we could help each other. I am the creator of open-tv.
- I managed to get it somehow working, but it got rejected by Flathub, because they don't want me to build webkit and use the network during build (which I need)
  
  I'm working on resticity, a restic frontend.
  
  Not relying on the network during a build is pretty common while making an rpm package. It's a pretty reasonable requirement to have. I'd suggest looking into what e.g. the equivalent Fedora package does.
  
  Is that webkit version outdated? In general you should try to support one of the supported versions.
Well, I would agree in general but also anything involving khtml/webkit/blink and its various other forks is a nightmare to compile.
- but it works on my PC 😅
  
  Then let's ship your PC, that's how containers work, right?
not just you, I've read it before from other devs
I'm currently helping package some dotnet apps and so far yeah it kinda sucks

Though at least on my case dotnet might be more to blame
Noice! I got a successfull build of a flatpak bundle (without webkit) using GitHub actions. the bundle can be downloaded and installed via flatpak install --user xxx.flatpak and it's running.

Now I need to figure out, how to publish this to Flathub.
So us security/enterprise types hate it AND packagers hate it?

We'll have all of you back building 12 different package formats in no time!
- I wonder if app devs would actually prefer snap
  
  yes... since it's way easier to distribute, anything, by anyone.
  
  Speaking of which... I'm the official maintainer of all the crypto wallets out there.. trust me, bro!
Bummer! Flathub doesn't want me to use Gnome 3.38, since it's EOL :-(
- What actively supported distro still uses GNOME 3.38?
  
  I had assumed, since I can do flatpak install org.gnome.Sdk and select 3.38 (there are even older 3.x versions to select from), that they left it for older GTK apps that are not (yet) compatible with newer runtimes.
No.

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