Statically linked appstreamcli

[probonopd]

A statically linked appstreamcli of the latest release would be tremendously helpful, since the AppStream spec and the tool are evolving and currently users suffer from outdated versions delivered with distributions. This is especially cumbersome for LTS and Enterprise distributions.

Hence, it would be very welcome if this project could build and provide a static version.

[hughsie]

As an aside, I think a web service where you could check AppData would be a really useful thing to have. Personally I'd much rather have appstreamcli in the default flatpak freedesktop runtime, which could be updated nightly.

[probonopd]

I am trying to do a static build, so I added to the top of CMakeLists.txt:

SET(CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES ".a")
SET(BUILD_SHARED_LIBRARIES OFF)
SET(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "-static")

But I run into:

[ 44%] Building C object tools/CMakeFiles/appstreamcli.dir/ascli-actions-pkgmgr.c.o
[ 46%] Building C object tools/CMakeFiles/appstreamcli.dir/ascli-actions-misc.c.o
[ 47%] Linking C executable appstreamcli
/usr/bin/ld: attempted static link of dynamic object `../src/libappstream.so.0.11.4'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
tools/CMakeFiles/appstreamcli.dir/build.make:227: recipe for target 'tools/appstreamcli' failed
make[2]: *** [tools/appstreamcli] Error 1
CMakeFiles/Makefile2:250: recipe for target 'tools/CMakeFiles/appstreamcli.dir/all' failed
make[1]: *** [tools/CMakeFiles/appstreamcli.dir/all] Error 2
Makefile:138: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2

What do I need to do?

[probonopd]

Note to self how I made a self-standing AppImage: AppImage/AppImageKit#225 (comment)

[probonopd]

@ximion let me know whether you would like to have a PR that generates such an AppImage from the Travis CI build. It would be 20 MB large because it would have to bundle all involved libraries and the loader.

[ximion]

I am not very keen on shipping any "official" binary here, because I would not use (and test) that, and I prefer people building their own AppStream version.
But if there is anything I can do to make it easier to build a static version, PRs welcome! (building that in Travis would also be fine, just shipping it as an official binary is something I wouldn't like to do currently).
Please note that the next release will likely use Meson exclusively already - I have never built anything statically linked with Meson yet, so I would have to learn how to do it myself first as well.

@hughsie Coincidentally I have written a tiny web service that does exactly that (check AppStream files with ascli), it was part of my D experiments. In order to make the thing available publicly, I would need to basically rewrite some chunks, because the code was just a learning exercise (and it's not very good).
Having AS in the Flatpak runtime would make a lot of sense, but I guess that wouldn't help AppImageKit (also, would it be okay to continuously update AS in the runtime?).

[probonopd]

@ximion for AppImage, a static build (or a library that still runs on 14.04 LTS) could go into appimagetool (the tool that is used to generate AppImages). Currently appimagetool only verifies AppStream metainfo files if appstreamcli and/or appstream-util is installed on the host (which may well be very outdated and lead to false alarms, or even worse, defective metainfo files).

[ximion]

Meson allows you to make a version of appstreamcli that is statically linked to libappstream relatively easily.
Linking in all the other libraries is not done automatically though, I guess that doing that will be a lot more challenging.

With libappstream linked in statically, appstreamcli still requires these libraries:

linux-vdso.so.1
libglib-2.0.so.0
libgobject-2.0.so.0
libgio-2.0.so.0
libxml2.so.2
libyaml-0.so.2 
libstemmer.so.0d 
libc.so.6 
libpcre.so.3 
libpthread.so.0 
libffi.so.6 
libgmodule-2.0.so.0 
libz.so.1 
libselinux.so.1 
libresolv.so.2 
libmount.so.1 
libdl.so.2 
libicui18n.so.57 
libicuuc.so.57 
libicudata.so.57 
liblzma.so.5 
libm.so.6 
libblkid.so.1 
librt.so.1 
libstdc++.so.6 
libgcc_s.so.1 
libuuid.so.1 

(only the dependency on libstemmer can be switched off)

[ximion]

@probonopd I don't think there is much I can do in AppStream itself as of now - things might get easy for you when mesonbuild/meson#484 is resolved, and linking libappstream into appstreamcli as static library is also an easy task, but anything more is more tedious to do.

[probonopd]

OK @ximion thanks for the hint. In the meantime, I am happily using an appstreamcli-x86_64.AppImage that I've put together with this method. Works for me on Ubuntu 14.04 on Travis CI.

[probonopd]

Maybe a hosted version as a webservice would be a solution - people could POST their file there for validation and get back a response.

[ximion]

That could relatively easily be done, but I am very worried about the volume of requests that service would get (and I'd have to figure out where to host it).