nimforum mirror - Publishing a Nim app in Flathub

adnan (orginal) [2021-01-31T01:37:05+01:00] view original

Recently I authored a small GUI program as a proof of concept Nim/Flatpak app and published in Flathub. I just wanted to share a couple of small notes:

There is no official Nim SDK, so you will need to build it yourself. You can use a prebuilt SDK for the amd64 platform but there is none for aarch64, in which case you need to build it from the source:

modules:
  - name: nim_amd64
    sources:
      - type: archive
        url: https://nim-lang.org/download/nim-1.4.2-linux_x64.tar.xz
        sha256: 55f22b2d6754721a8a1473e20bc3e49ffd9b073f0c14b53df40afb12e26d621e
        dest: nim_sdk_amd64
    buildsystem: simple
    cleanup:
      - "*"
    build-commands:
      - >
          if [ $(uname -m) == "x86_64" ]; then
            mkdir -p /app/lib/sdk/nim
            cp -r nim_sdk_amd64/* /app/lib/sdk/nim
            chmod -R 755 /app/lib/sdk/nim/bin;
          fi
  - name: nim_source_generic
    sources:
      - type: archive
        url: https://nim-lang.org/download/nim-1.4.2.tar.xz
        sha256: 03a47583777dd81380a3407aa6a788c9aa8a67df4821025770c9ac4186291161
        dest: nim_sdk
    buildsystem: simple
    cleanup:
      - "*"
    build-commands:
      - >
          if [ $(uname -m) != "x86_64" ]; then
            mkdir -p /app/lib/sdk/nim
            cd nim_sdk && sh build.sh && bin/nim c koch && ./koch boot -d:release && ./koch tools && cd ..
            cp -r nim_sdk/* /app/lib/sdk/nim
            chmod -R 755 /app/lib/sdk/nim/bin;
          fi

here I am downloading a redundant SDK module (since I am using only one of them depending on the platform), if anyone experienced with flatpak wants the help me out here, it'd be great. I am looking for a way to describe a platform specific module in flatpak.

Flathub build environment restricts third party package managers from accessing the internet. Many languages have their "dependency generator" like rust: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-builder-tools/blob/master/cargo/flatpak-cargo-generator.py. The idea is that flathub build bot will download the described sources themselves and then the whole project should be built offline. However if you have a nimbledeps folder, nimble will download dependencies locally, and you can add them in your source tree. It's a clever way to get around the lack of source generators. I feel that nim has a lot of hidden gems that don't get much appreciation.

My next plan is to port it to windows, which honestly feels quite more challenging. I haven't used windows in a while and I don't know much about windows app installer frameworks.

Also if anyone knows about an HTML to PDF converter package please recommend me.

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