Please create or help to crete an appimage for the oversteer app

[lestcape]

Oversteer is the unofficial official app for setting up Racing Wheel in Linux. It's accomplished with an unofficial official driver new-lg4ff of the same author that i hope will reach the Linux kernel nearby at some point, since most Linux games work on this driver, but not on the support that the kernel itself has, since this driver is more versatile and includes support for several devices at the same time.

The author @berarma express his intention to create an appimage, but seem to be complicated and it's possible that he could need help on that task. Some years ago he said:

"I've still not given up doing an AppImage and while I wouldn't use it, some people has repeatedly asked for it.".

Also, I do not forget to mention that can be launched as a console app: oversteer --help. That is my really use case, because this app and the driver (new-lg4ff) are the last piece of software not really portable in my setup. I think the driver can not be make portable so this would actually be the 'last piece'.

This seems like a challenge because is probably that make the app portable will required a change in the code of the app, as it really work at close to the specific hardware, but you have a lot of experience, would you be willing to attempt to help with this one?

[Samueru-sama]

I'm not great at making appimages of python apps, the only one I have is this one and the build started to fail because it seems the pip package broke.

[lestcape]

Ohh well, please not worried. I guess someone will do it at some point or else I can continue installing it from the sources, as I have done before, since I see it as if it were part of the driver itself.

[Samueru-sama]

cc @Drsheppard01 you as well since you mentioned oversteer in another issue.

---

I recently tried package oversteer now that Max added uv integration with sharun which makes it easier to package python apps, see: https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/puddletag-AppImage/blob/main/puddletag-appimage.sh#L21-L27

However for this to work the app needs to be in pip, which has not been updated in over 5 years: https://pypi.org/project/oversteer/#files

[Samueru-sama]

@lestcape does this work?

https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/oversteer-AppImage/releases

I can launch it in Artixlinux and ubuntu 18.04 without problem, however it does not work alpine linux, it complains about locales even though they are bundled.

And launching it with LC_ALL=C LANG="" causes this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/samuel/Volatile/AppDir/bin/oversteer", line 53, in <module>
    sys.exit(app.run(sys.argv))
             ~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/tmp/samuel/Volatile/AppDir/lib/python3.13/site-packages/oversteer/application.py", line 63, in run
    self.device_manager.start()
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
  File "/tmp/samuel/Volatile/AppDir/lib/python3.13/site-packages/oversteer/device_manager.py", line 54, in start
    context = pyudev.Context()
  File "/tmp/samuel/Volatile/AppDir/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pyudev/core.py", line 59, in __init__
    self._libudev = load_ctypes_library("udev", SIGNATURES, ERROR_CHECKERS)
                    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/tmp/samuel/Volatile/AppDir/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pyudev/_ctypeslib/utils.py", line 51, in load_ctypes_library
    raise ImportError("No library named %s" % name)
ImportError: No library named udev

When libudev is already bundled and used 🤔

[lestcape]

It works on Debian 13 (trixie). The error makes me think that udev is loaded in one context, but is being searched for from another context where it isn't. The strange thing is that the error seems to depend on some kind of external configuration... Otherwise, the error would occur in all cases...

[Samueru-sama]

Alright there has been progress as to why this doesn't work in alpine linux. turns out this app needs an UTF-8 locale to work, what I doing originally of falling back to the C locale was wrong, already added a fix here for that and I'm trying to upstream that directly to sharun.

There is another issue still though, for some reason and this only happens in alpine, the app ends up running cc compiler on startup, so that means that if I don't have the build-base package installed in alpine linux it fails to work.

[lestcape]

Well, I think this app was a challenge for you from the start, unlike the others. However, perhaps you're already confident with what you have, and it would be good to share that with the developer. I think he should have an idea of ​​why the application needs to compile something in some special cases, like perhaps the one that occurs in Alpine.

[Samueru-sama]

Well, I think this app was a challenge for you from the start, unlike the others.

that's python for ya.

I think he should have an idea of ​​why the application needs to compile something in some special cases

The issue goes deeper and happens with some python libraries. Similar incident happened with a different python app here

[lestcape]

Oooh... In that case, he probably has no idea what you're asking and thinks you have even less idea. That kind of thing seems like magic. I think Python recently incorporated Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, but since it only happens in Alpine, it doesn't seem plausible.

[Samueru-sama]

The issue is that the ctypes library runs /sbin/ldconfig -p and this fails in alpine linux since it doesn't support the -p flag. The output of /sbin/ldconfig is not needed here, the problem is that /sbin/ldconfig -p errors and that stops any further lookup.

Will report this to sharun.