Over the past week I started on an experiment: building the git master branch of Blender in Flatpak.

And I decided to go crazy on it, and also build all its dependencies from their respective git master branch.

I've just pushed the result to my flatpak repo, and it seems to work in my limited testing.

As a result, you can now try out the bleeding edge of Blender development safely with Flatpak, and here's how.

First, install the Freedesktop Flatpak runtime:

$ wget https://sdk.gnome.org/keys/gnome-sdk.gpg
$ flatpak remote-add --user --gpg-import=./gnome-sdk.gpg gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/repo/
$ flatpak install --user gnome org.freedesktop.Platform 1.4

Next, install the Blender app from the master branch of my repo:

$ flatpak remote-add --user --no-gpg-verify bochecha https://www.daitauha.fr/static/flatpak/repo-apps/
$ flatpak install --user bochecha org.blender.app master

That's it!

I want to be clear that I will not build this every day (or every night) as a real "nightly". I just don't have the computing resources to do that, and every build is a big hit on my laptop. (Did I mention this includes building Boost from git master? 😅)

However I'll try to rebuild it from time to time, to pick up updates.

Also, I want to note that this is an experiment in pushing the bleeding edge for Blender to the maximum with Flatpak. If upstream Blender eventually provided nightly builds as Flatpak (for which I'd be happy to help them), they probably would compromise on which dependencies to build from stable releases, and which ones to build from their git master branches.

For example, they probably wouldn't use Python from master like I do. Right now that means this build uses the future 3.7 release of Python, even though 3.6 hasn't been released yet. ☻

Another bad idea in this build is Boost from master, which takes ages just to fetch its myriad of git submodules, let alone build it.

But for an experiment in craziness, it works surprisingly well.

Try it out, and let me know how it goes!