Include blender executable

[lw64]

Currently it is inconvenient to setup and not secure to use blender installed on the host. Also on image based operating systems you cannot modify the host and install for example blender. And using blender installed through flatpak is even more inconvenient to set up.
Because of this I would really like it if a blender executable is included by default in the godot flatpak, so that zero setup time is needed and it just works out of the box.

[Calinou]

Unfortunately, the Blender distribution is quite large, so having it as a hard dependency doesn't sound great to me. Many people are on slow connections, and fast download times are important for Godot – the Flatpak is already quite larger than the official Linux distribution, after all.

I would prefer if we can call the Blender Flatpak externally somehow, so that it can be used as a soft dependency.

[lw64]

The only way I can think of to achieve this would be to make the blender flatpak provide a dbus API that the godot flatpak can then access. One aspect to consider is that same files shipped with godot and blender only take up space on the disk once.

[lw64]

It would be of course possible to write a blender plugin that provides such an API, but that seems like work and also requires again setup effort. Another option is to add an extension point to the godot flatpak, where extensions can be mounted. Then with ideally one click you could install the blender extension and it all works.

[cassidyjames]

I may be completely misunderstanding the limitations here, but flatpak-spawn --host flatpak run org.blender.Blender works fine from within the Godot Flatpak sandbox. It would be nice if Godot knew it was running in a sandbox and made it easier to set those commands up, but it's no impossible today.

Edit: I just re-read the Blender section in the README and it's a bit more complex than that; you can make a bash script that executes the correct command. But still, this does seem like something that could be upstreamed; regardless of whether Godot is in a Flatpak, Blender can be in a Flatpak and Godot should still be able to use it.

[lw64]

Yeah, that would work too. I guess that it would be marked as "unsafe" doesn't matter too much.

[aliasbody]

Don't know if this is still open, but I was thinking about a bash script called "blender" that would search for either the OS-installed blender OR flatpak'd and server as a proxy for godot. In this case if the user has any compatible blender installed it would work, otherwise it would simply display the message it already displays.

I'll try to make an example and provide a pull-request to be evaluated.