We had aarch64 builds of the runtime since the very early days of Flatpak (long before Flathub), and you could manually build your applications for aarch64 natively or by using qemu. Now you will also be able to download aarch64 builds of GNOME applications straight from the Nightly repository so all 3 of you out there with such machines can finally rejoice.
The person mostly responsible for this is my good friend Julian Sparber who got around shorting through all the infrastructure needed and baited me into fixing the edge cases. Special thanks also to Bart for taking care of the GitLab Runners as usual.
We’ve also updated the CI guide to include the aarch64 builds, here is an example Merge Request for gnome-weather. In short this is what you need to have in your .gitlab-ci.yml to test and push the builds into the repository.
include: 'https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/citemplates/raw/master/flatpak/flatpak_ci_initiative.yml'
.vars-devel:
variables:
MANIFEST_PATH: "build-aux/flatpak/org.gnome.NautilusDevel.yml"
FLATPAK_MODULE: "nautilus"
APP_ID: "org.gnome.NautilusDevel"
RUNTIME_REPO: "https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo"
BUNDLE: "nautilus-dev.flatpak"
flatpak@x86_64:
extends: ['.flatpak@x86_64', '.vars-devel']
flatpak@aarch64:
extends: ['.flatpak@aarch64', '.vars-devel']
nightly@x86_64:
extends: '.publish_nightly'
needs: ['flatpak@x86_64']
nightly@aarch64:
extends: '.publish_nightly'
needs: ['flatpak@aach64']The main difference from the existing x86_64 build is the template job you extend, as well as the needs: of the added nightly job.
And that’s it. Enjoy!