The reference AppIndicator implementation has been deprecated/abandoned in newer distros.
Co-Authored-By: Guilherme Silva <626206+guihkx@users.noreply.github.com>
Some systems (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04, which we use to make the AppImage),
have ancient versions of meson and ninja, which is not good when we
have dependencies like PyGObject 3.47+ (and more recently, one of its
transitive dependencies, pycairo 1.27+) requiring a fairly recent
version of meson to be able to be built.
So, instead of relying on whatever meson/ninja version the current
system provides us with to make the AppImage, this change will simply
install up-to-date, official wheels of meson/ninja directly from PyPI.
This also allows us to finally unpin PyGObject's version.
Ubuntu 20.04 only has Python 3.8, and because the 'truststore'
dependency requires at least Python 3.10, the AppImage package would
need to bundle CA certificates from 'certifi' to make HTTPS requests
work at all, which is quite an ugly workaround.
Unfortunately, as a side effect, building on Ubuntu 22.04 increases the
minimum required version of glibc from 2.31 to 2.35.
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/
