Flathub's recent ban on AI-using projects (see #6724) puts Lutris's
Flatpak channel at risk, and Flatpak has always been an awkward fit
anyway: Lutris is fundamentally an unsandboxed game manager that needs
to call host xrandr, 7z, fuser, wine, flatpak, mount drives, and reach
the user's whole $HOME. AppImage gives us a single-file distribution
that does none of that sandboxing.
This adds `make appimage`, which builds a self-contained AppImage in
a Docker/Podman container based on Ubuntu 22.04 (glibc 2.35, Python
3.10, GTK3, WebKit2GTK 4.1). The pipeline:
utils/appimage/build.sh — host wrapper (docker or podman)
utils/appimage/Dockerfile — build env with all GI typelibs
utils/appimage/build-in-container.sh
— assembles AppDir via linuxdeploy
+ linuxdeploy-plugin-gtk, runs
appimagetool
utils/appimage/AppRun — launcher; sources plugin-gtk hook,
sets PYTHONPATH, execs bundled
python3 with bin/lutris
Design notes worth flagging for review:
* The bundled Python is the build image's /usr/bin/python3.10 plus its
stdlib, with tkinter/test/idle stripped.
* PyGObject and dbus-python are taken from apt (python3-gi, python3-dbus)
rather than pip — both have switched to meson-python build backends
that drag in a sizeable toolchain, and the prebuilt packages link
against exactly the libgirepository/libdbus we already bundle from
the same distro.
* AppRun deliberately does NOT export LD_LIBRARY_PATH. linuxdeploy
already sets $ORIGIN-relative RPATH on every binary it deploys, and
exporting LD_LIBRARY_PATH would leak into every host subprocess —
which surfaced immediately when flatpak crashed loading our bundled
libssl 3.0 instead of the host's 3.4. The build script patchelf's
the RPATH on the manually-copied _gi.so / _dbus*.so so they still
find the bundled libgirepository without the env override.
* PATH is left intact apart from prepending $APPDIR/usr/bin, so host
tools (xrandr, 7z, wine, flatpak) still win — that's the whole
point of choosing AppImage over Flatpak here.
Output is dist/Lutris-<version>-x86_64.AppImage at ~83 MB. Smoke-tested
end-to-end on Fedora 43 Nobara: boots GUI, GPU detection, DB load,
service auth, GTK theme, and host subprocess invocations all work.
Refs #6724.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
