Latest Appimages don't run and appear to be empty

[ericccaz]

The latest builds (after July 11 or so) of Waterfox do not run and list in Archiver as empty, though they are the normal size. According to the maintainer, Hawkeye116477, no changes have been made other than some code updates. Other Appimages work fine as do the older builds of Waterfox. It seems like there may be a glitch in the packaging process. Here is a link to the latest build:

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/hawkeye116477:/waterfox/AppImage/waterfox-g-6.5.10-1.34.Build2.11.glibc2.25-x86_64.AppImage.

I'm not sure if this is an AppImage problem or something to do with openSUSE. OS is Arch. Any insight is appreciated. Thanks.

[probonopd]

Thanks @ericccaz for reporting this. However, please do report this to Waterfox and openSUSE OBS.

Most likely OBS is still using a very outdated appimagetool (and its bundled runtime) from https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases. This should no longer be used since it requires libfuse2, which most systems don't have anymore nowadays.

Instead, the new appimagetool from https://github.com/AppImage/appimagetool/releases/tag/continuous should be used.

There is one caveat: The new appimagetool doesn't come with the AppImage runtime bundled, as the old one did. So it downloads it on demand. This won't work on OBS since the OBS build process doesn't allow Internet access. So the matching runtime for the architecture must be downloaded from https://github.com/AppImage/type2-runtime/releases beforehand and must be passed in to appimagetool with --runtime-file.

Reference:

• Writing in releases "DO NOT USE ANYMORE" is not enough, almost nobody will read it! #1395

cc @TheAssassin @adrianschroeter