4.9.3 AppImage issue

[David Tillotson]

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:03:00 +0100
Paul Buxton <paulbuxton.mail at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hmm, this looks pertinent
> https://wiki.debian.org/MachineId

Interesting article. Reading that, I'm now even more puzzled as to what
this is for. Every claimed use is already covered by other mechanisms
as far as I know.

> Can I ask when you added the file, was that in your local system, or
> did you somehow insert it into the appimage? My guess is the former...

You are right with that guess - not sure how it would be added to the
appimage!

> The end of that article assumes that chroot/container environments
> would populate the machine id from the host system into the container.
> I confess I am not 100% clear on how Appimage works, but I suspect it
> is combining the folders in the Appimage mount with the host system
> folders, and as your system doesn't use systemd this file doesn't
> exist.

That does seem to be what is happening - creating a valid(ish) file
works, so whatever is using it doesn't care what is in the file.
Changing the file to a different one (32 1s) had no effect.

> I will try and understand a bit more about how appimage works and see
> if I can suggest a proper solution unless someone who knows better can
> fix it first. :-)

I would guess that adding a file to the appimage would work, if I could
figure out how. I'm happy to test any attempted fixes in the meantime.

> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 9:05 AM David Tillotson
> <david at acmelabs.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > I have discovered an issue with the layest AppImage, that seems to
> > be the result of an assumption by the included systemd components.
> >
> > On my Devuan system, I was unable to launch the AppImage, and on
> > checking found that it was due to a missing file
> > ("/usr/local/var/lib/dbus/system-id" or "/etc/system-id"). An empty
> > file isn't sufficient, as dbus expects a 32 char hex string, so I
> > just created a random one, which worked.
> >
> > Hopefully this is just a flaw in the AppImage build, and not
> > another step along the path from GNU/Linux to Systemd/GNU/Linux! ;-)
> >
> > David Tillotson
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