Try bumping the version of Ubuntu. #3103
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Just doing some testing as running PyInstaller on my machine creates a distribution which works on my machine but the distribution generated by Github actions does not work on my machine.
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Interesting observation - presumably this is another case where desktop daemons or settings are not isolated from the libraries in the pyinstaller bundle :( Did it work? Without going down this path, does deleting additional environment variables help? My previous suggestion worked by unsetting a selection of variables until it worked ok - you could also try that (look at the output of Moving beyond this as an experiment, increasing the linux baseline for the installer needs some care - you're fighting difficulties with compatibility from old build-host to newer desktop machine; unfortunately the other order (old desktop and newer build host) will never work because libc6 and some essential friends are not in the pyinstaller bundle at all. Perhaps 22.04 is old enough to be a fair baseline at this stage anyway. Not sure if you have looked at the CI failure yet. The test failure in CI hopefully goes away when updating the Ubuntu version in the installer test job to match - the (I wonder if there are better options than pyinstaller these days; I'm rapidly thinking I'd rather spend effort on that than continuing to hit my head against it) |
It did actually in that it produced a distribution which worked on my machine. However, I ran it under an Ubuntu 20 container since I noticed a warning message in one of the comments, and it did indeed break there. I believe this was because it was expecting a newer glibc version than what was present on the system.
Yeah I suspected this would be something we would have to discuss extensively if this change were to be merged.
Yes I did see the failure. I only created this PR so I could get Github to generate a build as I was trying to figure out why builds done on my machine were working but not the ones done on Github (which, as I suspected, had something to do with the Ubuntu versions).
I've been working on a Flatpak container for Sasview, and I've just managed to get one working today. However, it does rely on the PyInstaller distribution. I did originally try to build the container from scratch but the Flatpak builder does not have network access so running the normal As an alternative, I considered building a Flatpak container with the PyInstaller distribution instead. This might be a bit problematic because it depends on those being built in separate process. However, I have managed to get it to work. I haven't been able to test this extensively yet but theoretically it should run on other (and older) distributions because all of the libraries needed are either in the PyInstaller distribution, or in the container itself. This means that, as long as we can get a PyInstaller build that will work in the Flatpak container, then it should work wherever. Thank you so much for your help in this work :) |
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I should also add that I spoke to another member of my team today who suggested looking into Singularity containers as well, and shared with me some training material which I am going to review. That could be a potential alternative to Flatpak (or if possible we could do both). |
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singularity seems popular for calculation engines while desktop users seem more used to flatpak for applications (like Chrome, Teams, ...). Once unpacked, the python package is not in general relocatable (which is why you can't copy a venv around) and that gets in the way of some approaches; I assume that flatpak does some funky bind mounts to make for reproducible locations. Incidentally, wheels can be just popped into PYTHONPATH without installing them which is an intriguing prospect if their scripts and entry points aren't needed. It's also possible to pre-download files for pip and use its cache - could that work with the flatpak builder? I looked at https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/python.html some time ago and I got the impression that this supposed to be possible. |
I recall looking at this page previously as it references the script I was talking about ( I'm going to be leaving work soon but will continue looking into this tomorrow. |
Just doing some testing as running PyInstaller on my machine creates a distribution which works on my machine but the distribution generated by Github actions does not work on my machine.