Wheels

Positron uses wheels to install dependencies within the Flatpak building process. As you can see, we run a Docker image to create a wheels folder with all the dependencies. This is because the Python inside the runtime is different from the one in the host system. The org.freedesktop.Sdk runtime is based on Python 3.11.9 and to ensure compatibility, we need to use the same version to build the dependencies.

If in the future, the runtime is updated to a newer version of Python, we will need to update the Docker image to use the same version. Simply change the FROM python:3.11.9-slim line in the Dockerfile to the new version and rebuild the image. The rest of the process will remain the same.

You may ask, why not just use runtime Python to download and install packages during the build process? The answer is simple, yet makes no sense. With the buildsystem: simple, we don't have access to remote resources, so we can't download packages from the internet. This is why we need to use a Docker image to create the wheels folder with all the dependencies.