I developed this a bit further, though there's still more I hope to do with it.
It turns out that building a custom runtime is discouraged; the better way to support game developers is to build a 'base app', which people can then add their own game files to. I have prepared two different base apps: one includes Python 3.6, and makes a download of about 30 MiB. The other uses Python 3.4 from the shared runtime, so is a download of about 7 MiB. My idea is that the game developer can choose between the latest language features and a quicker installation. My next step is to make a more complete example of using this to package a game (so far, I've tested with the 'aliens' example that ships with pygame). I might try with the solarwolf example on Pygame's Github org - or if anyone wants to suggest another suitable open-source game based on pygame, I could try with that. Thomas On 26 February 2017 at 19:47, Thomas Kluyver <tak...@gmail.com> wrote: > I spent a while today playing with Flatpak, a new system for packaging > sandboxed applications on Linux. The result is an example that can build > and install Pygame's Aliens example game: > > https://github.com/takluyver/pygame-flatpak-test > > If you're running Fedora 24+, Ubuntu 16.10 (might need a PPA?) Debian > testing/unstable or Arch, you can install Flatpak and try it out. > > This is quite rough at the moment, but I think it has good potential for > distributing games to Linux users in the future. It looks like [1] Flatpak > is on its way to becoming the default cross-distro app distribution > mechanism for desktop Linux. > > The big improvement I'd like to make is building a dedicated Flatpak > 'runtime' for pygame, including a newer version of Python - the base > runtime I'm using at present has Python 3.4. > > Thanks, > Thomas > > [1] https://kamikazow.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/adoption-of- > flatpak-vs-snap/ >
