SàT progress note 2019-W26

goffi 5 years ago jabber-xmpp-en SàT project libre SàT progress

Hello everybody,

I was targeting end of June for the release, it seems that I'll have to postpone: it's not ready yet, there are still a couple of annoying bugs. That's a really boring part from a developer point of view, you have to take care of polishing, and things around the code (like the website, documentation or packaging), and you don't see your project evolving much. It's far more exciting to work on new features or experiments, but you need to go through polishing if you want something usable.

I've been talking about Flatpak last week, I still had to do some work on it.

After getting working packages for Cagou, Primitivus and Jp, I've created a repository for that (https://salut-a-toi.org/flatpak/sat-repo) and the flatpakref files which are metadata telling where to find and how to install the packages. I was happy to finally have a simple way to install Cagou so people could test it and give feedback, so I've sent a short notice on Diaspora and ActivityPub. I've indeed quickly got feeback reporting the outdated runtime (1.6 while 18.8 is now available, I've just missed it while working with my Manifest from last year), then I had to update the package again.

Once again, feedback has been useful (thanks JBB), so please if you see something buggy or you would like to see something (new feature or anything), let me know!

During my own test I realised that the MIME type for the flatpak refs files was wrong too (it was text/html so the browser was displaying them instead of downloading them). That was a bad default value used in Libervia, and it's now fixed.

After updating the runtime, testing it successfully without installation (using flatpak-builder --run build-dir org.gimp.GIMP.json sat_wrapper) and uploading it, I've had the bad surprise to realise that python2 was missing when trying to run the package normally. It is actually available in the SDK so it was working while testing with flatpak-builder, but not anymore in the runtime (which make sense as Python 2 support will be stopped next year, but still SàT is using it and will move to Python 3 for 0.8 release). So I had to compile Python 2 myself, and make several try to make it work correctly (and that's only after it worked that I have discovered that there was a pre-made module offered by Flatpak teams).

All of that to get this thing:

Cagou flatpak package seen on KDE Discover

Integration in the package manager (here Discover from KDE) is nice to have, and I hope that it will be the case by default in most distributions in some time. I'll propose the package on Flathub (the central repository of Flatpak) once the stable release is out.

There are still some little issues on the package/metadata (like the screenshot which are not at the recommended 16:9 format), but I'll take care of them later, I have already spent enough time there and I need to move forward. Furthermore, the screenshots seem to be displayed correctly beside their format on KDE Discover and GNOME Software.

Far more serious, there are some crashes on the Flatpak version of Cagou (I've had a infinite recursion crash when clicking on bookmarks) that I don't have on normal packages, so I have to debug that but that's part of the general debugging phase I'm now in.

To install dev preview packages of Cagou, Primitivus or Jp from Flatpak, just enter the following commands:

  • flatpak install --user https://salut-a-toi.org/flatpak/org.salutatoi.Cagou_dev.flatpakref
  • flatpak install --user https://salut-a-toi.org/flatpak/org.salutatoi.Primitivus_dev.flatpakref
  • flatpak install --user https://salut-a-toi.org/flatpak/org.salutatoi.Jp_dev.flatpakref

And later to update them:

  • flatpak update

Or use your graphical software manager. I'll add the links to the website soon, so it should be installable in a few clicks.

Remember that it's dev version, so expect bugs, and in addition there are still some issues specific to the Flatpak version that I'll try to fix today.

That's really a lot of time spent on those packages, but I now have scripts which will help to updates everything easily. Imagine if I had to do all packages myself for every GNU/Linux distributions + Docker + Flatpak + AppImage + Snap + YunoHost + Android + *BSD + Windows + Mac OS + … . I'm already doing several on this list, but I can't do everything alone, so if you feel you can help on packaging, please contact me (see address at the bottom of https://salut-a-toi.org or join us in our official room at sat@chat.jabberfr.org or via web). Note that there are already people working on Arch packages and on Debian and derivatives (but they need help).

So now it's all about debugging and documentation until the release.

E

edhelas 5 years ago