Prebuilt blobs for build-time deps?

1

Hi! I maintain a Proton/Wine extension that is often used as an add-on for Steam, and there is interest from my users in releasing it as a Flatpak to make installation (much) easier for that use case.

The issue is, the build process requires Wine and a mingw32(64) toolchain. Currently I have it building on GitHub Actions (with the relevant Ubuntu packages). Distributing the prebuilt binaries in Flatpak would be easiest, but I understand that’s frowned upon.

What’s the best/allowed way to approach this? I think getting the build to work inside flatpak-builder is probably doable if pulling in a prebuilt Wine as a build-time dependency is acceptable. I see there’s an sdk extension for MinGW, but not Wine itself (Wine itself is a Flatpak though). I don’t really want to maintain a Wine SDK extension just for this, I don’t have the bandwidth for that.

2

Pulling pre-built wine to build the package instead of pulling pre-built package seems like fancy for the sake of wasting CI minutes.

3

Well, on Flathub it is an requirement to build the software from source, whenever possible:

4

As I understand it, you need Wine only to link against it during build? During runtime it would use whatever Wine is used by the game, as set in Steam?

5

Yup that is the how it is supposed to work.

6

Yes, headers and linking. I think the only code from wine that ends up (statically) in the final executable is probably winecrt0 (startup code)?

7

Is it acceptable to build the wine from source, use it as build dependency and then remove it in cleanup?

9

I think that would be fine, though building all of Wine just for this seems… less than ideal…