AppImage requires LD_PRELOAD of libnss3.so

[michjans]

Hello,
I have created an AppImage on Ubuntu 16.04 of an application based on Qt 5.12 that makes use of a QWebEngineView. When I ran the AppImage for the first time, the applications starts fine, but as soon as I open a URL in the QWebEngineView then the same problem occured as mentioned in issue #35

I added the missing library libsoftokn3.so to the libraries in my AppImage and generated it again. Then the following error occurs as soon as I open a URL in the QWebEngineView:

[4135:4369:0424/101254.058992:ERROR:nss_util.cc(674)] Error initializing NSS with a persistent database (sql:/home/mjansen/.pki/nssdb): NSS error code: -8023
[4135:4369:0424/101254.059057:ERROR:nss_util.cc(154)] Error initializing NSS without a persistent database: NSS error code: -8023
[4135:4369:0424/101254.059064:FATAL:nss_util.cc(156)] nss_error=-8023, os_error=0
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)

The temporary solution is now to execute my AppImage as follows:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss3.so ./MyAppImage

The library libnss3.so is available in the AppImage

My question is: how can this be resolved without requiring the LD_PRELOAD to the AppImage execution?

Thanks,
Michiel

[michjans]

I did some further reading in the issues related to #35 and one of them suggested to remove the nss related libraries from the AppImage.
So I passed the following option to the commandline of linuxdeployqt
-exclude-libs=libnss3.so,libnssutil3.so

Then after rebuilding the AppImage, the problem is gone.
I don't understand why this works, but for me it does.

[probonopd]

Thanks for reporting.

The reason why we are not excluding those was #35, #35 (comment) and AppImageCommunity/pkg2appimage#114. If we can prove that all distributions are shipping usable versions of libnss3.so and libnssutil3.so then we can consider adding them to the excludelist again.