flatpak-ing Servo Nightly

Servo - that rendering engine written in Rust - can be built from source. But there are also nightly builds available.

Servo logo?

But the issue with those nightly builds is that they depend on $very old crypto libraries - which might be because the builder distro is so old - and those are not shipped on Fedora 25. This effectively makes it annoying to run these builds on Fedora.

One way to solve this issue is to provide a flatpak for these builds. Flatpaks are containers (shipping and runtime) and will thus also contain the dependencies - liek these nagging crypto libs.

However long story short, I’ve created this small repo which can be used to wrap the Servo nightly binaries in a flatpak wrapper - and it’s also adding the two annoying dependencies.

Thus - once they get published you can run Servo on your Fedora (or other flatpak distro) without issues.

Feel free to try it out:

$ git clone https://github.com/fabiand/flatpak-servo.git
$ cd flatpak-servo
$ pkcon install flatpak
# NOTE flathub seems to be down right now
$ make
$ flatpak run org.servo.Servo wikipedia.org
# OR - for browserhtml
$ flatpak run org.servo.Servo

You should be greeted with something like

Screenshot

I’m actually not sure why the browserhtml view is so broken …

Next step would be building servo from source using flatpak-builder.

It was actually pretty nice to work with flatpak.

::: {#footer} [ June 3rd, 2017 11:00pm ]{#timestamp} [servo]{.tag} [rust]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} [flatpak]{.tag} :::