Static linking in Appimage

[robertosw]

Would it be possible to statically link all used libraries when building an AppImage?
After all, the main use of the AppImage is to enable it to run on all linux distros.
Currently the AppImage only works in Debian-like distros, because all library paths are dynamically linked but with fixed paths.
This results in problems wenn running the AppImage on NixOS where all libraries are in the nix store, so the paths from the AppImage are never found.

I tried setting my rust target to linux-musl, but some transitive dependencies dont support this target.

[FabianLars]

This is super hard and at this point i doubt it's really possible with our current stack. Maybe once we have a servo integration that could be statically linked 🤔

Also, can you share the offending paths or some errors? The appimages are supposed to work on non-debian-like distros too, we even patch the webkitgtk .so binary for that 😅

[FabianLars]

You can basically ignore that part. When i asked this i didn't know we were talking about nixos and i only tested it on ubuntu&fedora where this isn't an issue.

[robertosw]

Oh okay, but is there any solution to this problem?
I already have the libthai package installed but this error doesnt go away.
To be fair, I am not entirely sure that the package also installed the library for every other app to use

[FabianLars]

Oh okay, but is there any solution to this problem?

Not reallyyy. There's the upstream discussion about a solution (#4930) but nobody's really confident 😅

[robertosw]

Is there any use installing the missing lib on my device? Or is it impossible to tell the AppImage where to search for that lib?

[FabianLars]

spawning the appimage like so may work LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/path/to/libdir:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" myapp.AppImage may work, assuming the system you run on has the required libraries installed.

[ilyagr]

This seems obvious in retrospect, but static linking would increase the size of the static binary dramatically. I haven't gotten it to work, but I know that installing the libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37 runtime dependency and all of its dependencies takes up 400MB on Ubuntu. I found this out in lima-vm/lima#2215 (reply in thread) (where the dynamic binary in question is a small Tauri program, and I truly installed it all from scratch since I was trying to run it all on a different architecture).