mc as AppImage

[for-coursera]

Maybe someone has any positive experience packaging mc into an AppImage?

I tried with appimage-builder¹ and with build-appimage-action, and while everything seems OK, the resulting AppImage fails to use some of the included files. For instance, I can get this when launching:

sfs_init(): Warning: file /usr/local/etc/mc/sfs.ini not found
Warning: cannot open /usr/local/libexec/mc/extfs.d directory
Warning: cannot load codepages list

While if I extract the AppImage, all the mentioned resources would be present in the squashfs-root folder.

My understanding is that for some reason, despite the fact that the AppImage creation process actually packs those files into the resulting AppImage, mc, when launched from it, looks for them outside, in the host machine's folders (doesn't find them and reports the failure).

In other words, I'm under impression that I'm maybe missing some options or some steps in my yml-recipe that would force mc to look inside the AppImage for these resources? Any hints would be more than welcome :)

Footnotes

1. For the reference, here's my AppImageBuilder.yml. ↩

[ossilator]

appimages require the builds to be relocatable. this is fundamentally opposite to traditional unix deployment processes, which is nicely illustrated by the fact that to this day there is no standardized way to obtain the path of the current executable. the qt toolkit abstracts over that, but has a limited range of supported platforms. i didn't find a glib equivalent.

[zyv]

Check this out:

• https://appimage-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/gimp_path_mapping.html

• https://source.midnight-commander.org/man/mc.html#FILES

mc/src/main.c

Lines 98 to 114 in 885426a

	/** POSIX version. The only version we support. */
	static void
	OS_Setup (void)
	{
	mc_shell_init ();
	// This is the directory, where MC was installed, on Unix this is DATADIR
	// and can be overridden by the MC_DATADIR environment variable
	const char *datadir_env = g_getenv ("MC_DATADIR");
	if (datadir_env != NULL)
	mc_global.sysconfig_dir = g_strdup (datadir_env);
	else
	mc_global.sysconfig_dir = g_strdup (SYSCONFDIR);
	mc_global.share_data_dir = g_strdup (DATADIR);
	}

[for-coursera]

Thanks, Yury, that's exactly it!