Building a Flatpak app with BuildStream against Freedesktop SDK 1.8

[Sam Thursfield <sam thursfield codethink co uk>]

Hi all,

I've cross-posted this to buildstream-list and freedesktop-sdk-list as
I think it's relevant to both.

I had a go at building a Flatpak application bundle using BuildStream
and the new 1.8 SDK. I chose a small app with few dependencies: the
NetSurf web browser. The BuildStream project I ended up with can be
found in the sam/netsurf branch of buildstream-examples repo:

  https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream-examples/commits/sam/netsurf

Feedback welcome on whether this is a sane way of building Flatpaks ...

To make this possible I extracted the flatpak-image plugin from the
Freedesktop SDK. I'm proposing we merge it into the bst-external plugins
repo instead:

  https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/bst-external/merge_requests/18

I'd particularly appreciate feedback from Valentin on whether this is
OK in terms of license and attribution.

It would be nice to have this example maintained somewhere; should I do
a merge request against the buildstream-examples repo? We don't actually
have anything in there so far, but I'm not sure where else this would
live. I'm experimenting with writing a quick-start guide for
BuildStream[1] and am considering using this as an example project in
there.

The good news is that everything else works fine, and I can pretty
easily get the Netsurf web browser running inside Flatpak, with the
Freedesktop 1.8 Platform. Here's a screenshot!

  http://afuera.me.uk/junk/netsurf-flatpak.png

You may spot there that there are no GTK+ stock icons, which is because
there's no org.freedesktop.Platform.IconTheme extension available for
1.8 yet. There's an issue for this:

  https://gitlab.com/freedesktop-sdk/freedesktop-sdk/issues/69

Thanks
Sam

1. https://wiki.gnome.org/SamThursfield//BuildStreamQuickStart

--
Sam Thursfield, Codethink Ltd.
Office telephone: +44 161 236 5575