Dissatified by:

• Potentially conflicts with our patchelf --set-rpath step in

  ghostty/src/build/GhosttyExe.zig

  Line 36 in 73c7943

  run.addArgs(&.{ "patchelf", "--set-rpath", rpath });

  . I should setup Nix and test if this can be converted to an addRPathSpecial() as well.
• This mixes adding install steps into the deps.add() function
• We don't default to preferring a system-installed gtk4-layer-shell dylib.

Open issues in Zig related to RPath handling in the build system ziglang/zig#17373

FWIW, I applied this on top of 73c7943 on origin/main and can confirm that after removing .zig-cache it points to the system library:

[jbowen@bender ~]$ ldd /usr/local/bin/ghostty | grep libgtk4-layer
        libgtk4-layer-shell.so => /usr/local/bin/../lib/libgtk4-layer-shell.so (0x0000731136135000)
[jbowen@bender ~]$

I don't feel qualified to comment on any other aspects of it, but for now I'm going to carry the patch around to survive reboots.

Just a heads up/FYI, but the patch as-is at time of writing no longer cleanly applies after cfea2ea; cf. this bit (the diff of src/build/SharedDeps.zig is large, so GH doesn't expand it by default >:(, so the link doesn't work neatly, but if you do expand it the relevant portions are highlighted.)

I have the library in $PREFIX/lib/ after doing an install with this patch a few days ago, so I'm able to "survive" the loss of $BUILDDIR/.zig-cache/, but I won't be getting new copies of the library installed after building.

I have the library in $PREFIX/lib/ after doing an install with this patch a few days ago, so I'm able to "survive" the loss of $BUILDDIR/.zig-cache/, but I won't be getting new copies of the library installed after building.

@jwbowen Couldn't you stick to an older commit (i.e.: not upgrade for a bit) until this PR is merged?

@jwbowen Couldn't you stick to an older commit (i.e.: not upgrade for a bit) until this PR is merged?

I certainly could, but I really like riding the bleeding edge where I can and am willing to go out of my way to make it work. I'm not concerned with practicality in this case :)

I should have been clearer in my last message that I wasn't complaining about the patch, I just wanted to give a heads up/FYI.

Edit: I updated my previous comment to hopefully make that clearer. I'm very excited about the project :)

Should I leave the install step config at https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/6706/files#diff-3c27f71e7b0ef00072a7d994ae2af66c62b15fc7301fb43aad52bcd96a64da24R653-R654 or is there a better place to organise it?

At this point, an absolute rpath link is made in Debug mode but we default to system integration for gtk4-layer-shell so a source compile will give a system package not found error.

> ~/zig/0.14.0/files/zig build
install
└─ install ghostty
   └─ zig build-exe ghostty Debug native failure
error: error: unable to find dynamic system library 'gtk4-layer-shell-0' using strategy 'mode_first'. searched paths:
  /usr/local/lib64/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.so
  /usr/local/lib/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.so
  /lib64/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.so
  /lib/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.so
  /usr/lib64/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.so
  /usr/lib/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.so
  /usr/local/lib64/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.a
  /usr/local/lib/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.a
  /lib64/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.a
  /lib/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.a
  /usr/lib64/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.a
  /usr/lib/libgtk4-layer-shell-0.a

Otherwise I think this is in a working state where docs for building on Debian 12 (missing gtk4-layer-shell) need -fno-sys=gtk4-layer-shell and should configure custom prefix lib/ paths via ldconfig.

Checking in on this, adding the RPath config for an installed library only in debug mode for development seems to be no improvement over relying on Zig's default behaviour of placing the RPath of the build cache's version of the library.
It seems simpler to just default system integration for the majority of cases and correctly fix the missing installed library so users unable to system integrate can handle library path configuration on their own.

I think Zig defaults this RPath config to cache objects to make build script executables work, though forgot the source.

Defaulting this to true should have implications on our snap build, flatpak build and nix develop to have gtk4-layer-shell system installed