Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

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adrianinsaval
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by adrianinsaval »

onekk wrote: Mon Oct 10, 2022 3:45 pm You could even poke Ubuntu developers to make more updated packages for stable versions of FreeCAD.

Probably if many people will ask, some maintainers will make the package.
nope, their business is servers, and the packages are meant to be stable, ubuntu as a company won't move a finger about the freecad package, they just use whatever is on debian at the time of release and then you're stuck with that.
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onekk
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by onekk »

adrianinsaval wrote: Mon Oct 10, 2022 4:49 pm ...
nope, their business is servers, and the packages are meant to be stable, ubuntu as a company won't move a finger about the freecad package, they just use whatever is on debian at the time of release and then you're stuck with that.
Thanks for explanation.

I don't know in deep Ubuntu business.

IMHO OP is asking about availability of an updated packages for a "specific" distribution, even for a widespread one like Ubuntu without considering "how much hard work is behind" and "how much is difficult to follow" the miriad of distribution found on internet is somewhat a "limited sight".

There are no "real data" about "how much" a distribution is widespread, as even Distrowatch is showing "how many visitors" a distribution page has had, (in the last week?) and not the real "user base" of the distribution itself.

So it is more "smart" to find a way to make a decent "cross distribution" solution like AppImage or Snap or "conda install" than following and wasting time to "one distribution packaging system" and that this way is followed by many other programs out of here.

It is a "difficult world" and Linux world is not perfect. (but IMHO it usually work better than other OSes) :D

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Carlo D.
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by david69 »

those are automatic builds, still with broken dependencies and who knows what else.
I've learned something, thanks. For the rest, I am only a simple user of Ubuntu distrib. If at the end, I need to use AppImage, I'll do.
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yorik
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by yorik »

In any case, this thread shows there is interest for the PPA.
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s-light
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by s-light »

can someone at least change the information on the ppa page?
currently it reads:
This PPA repository hosts stable releases of FreeCAD for all supported versions of Ubuntu in 32 and 64-Bit architecture. These packages are more up to date than those found on the Ubuntu repositories.

for now i change to snap -
and will have to check how to use it for my blender importer
i think i have to extract the content to get to the lib files.. seems i have to investigate into this timely...
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by Kunda1 »

Yea...lets do something because we are wasting users time with an unmaintained PPA
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NormandC
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by NormandC »

Well that's a dispiriting read.

Snaps may be great for maintainers, but they absolutely suck for end users. Whomever said earlier in this topic "everybody love snaps", I don't know in what alternate universe you're living in. There are so many people driven off from Ubuntu at each release with snaps more and more taking over the system. The last one being Firefox, FFS. I'm still on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my desktop (!!!), and when comes the time to finally upgrade it next April, I'm seriously facing a dilemma. Anyway, not the debate here.

Liking PPA better is not package dogmatism (now that's an insulting remark), it's pragmatism from an end user POV. Everything is managed from one central place, Ubuntu's packaging/updating system. You add the PPA to your system sources, and you're done. AppImage and flatpak are little better than snaps in that regard.

How many times have people had problems over the years using Add-ons with the AppImage builds? Has this been solved yet, I wonder? We've never had such issues with the PPA package, because it is basically a system package.

I know some of the criticisms about PPAs is that it can mess up a system if system libraries are replaced. But with FreeCAD, no important system libraries (i.e. KDE, GNOME, Qt, libc and such) are affected. When the PPA replaced dependency packages with newer versions (libcoin for exemple), it very rarely affected other software.

That being said, I do understand that for a project such as FreeCAD, it's difficult to find maintainers for each major distro. Creating a single, cross-platform package makes sense. End users don't seem to be aware that even for such a major Linux distro as Debian (and probably others), finding package maintainers is problematic. I doubt if even 50% of the tens of thousands of packages in Debian have dedicated maintainers.

Add to that that over the years, the number of system libraries FreeCAD depends on has exploded. Thinking of the dependencies required by FEM for example.

That Debian packaging is such a complex mess does not help. Kurt did a terrific job repackaging FreeCAD, but it's now intricately linked with the Debian source package repo. You may not have to become a Debian Science Maintainer to contribute to it (I really don't know), but you need to push pull requests to the Salsa Git repository that hosts the Debian FreeCAD package (would PRs from a non-Debian maintainer be accepted? And if so, in a timely manner?). It effectively left sgrogan and me (the two previous FC PPA maintainers) unable to help further with the PPA.

The learning curve is steep: you need to master Git, bash scripts, patches, the whole Debian packaging toolset, etc. And deal with missing, or obsolete dependencies. Which I gather is part of the current issue.

When I was doing it, I never wanted to package for Debian, because it would have been too much for me to handle. The PPA was my sandbox, and it didn't matter if my packages were not DFSG-compliant.

I guess what I would suggest anyone willing to give it a shot at this time: to consider taking a step back to reduce the complexity a little. I would decouple the PPA recipe from Salsa. I would migrate it back to Launchpad. Then you have full control. Either to a Git repo or a Bazaar branch. I always found Bazaar easier to deal with than Git. Create Bazaar branches for each Ubuntu release (if the dependency versions are not the same between releases). Not sure if a recipe can nest a Bazaar branch into a Git repo (FreeCAD source code), that would be something to look into.

Launchpad does have documentation on packaging.

Anyway. I hope someone comes forward, good luck to them. Otherwise, I guess I'll have to start using AppImages when I upgrade my OS. :|
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NormandC
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by NormandC »

s-light wrote: Fri Oct 21, 2022 1:45 pm can someone at least change the information on the ppa page?
currently it reads:
Kunda1 wrote: Fri Oct 21, 2022 5:07 pm Yea...lets do something because we are wasting users time with an unmaintained PPA
Kunda1, I would have changed the PPA description right now, but I remembered that I left the team so I'm no longer able to do so.

At this time, only Yorik, Werner and you can do it. It's easy. When logged in, on the page linked by s-light there should be an edit button shown as a pencil icon besides the description.

Also, I suggest the team list be cleaned up. Anyone who's not contributed in a long time, or who never did, should be removed from the team. I would shorten the list to you, Yorik, Werner, Kurt and sgrogan (just in case). There's a proposed member pending since last July. If they're willing to help out, maybe approve them with minimal status. But only if they made contact on the forum first... Back in the day, I kept getting out-of-the-blue requests from randos with zero activity on Launchpad. At first I'd approve them but it always amounted to nothing. Then I'd email them requesting they join the forum. Then I just straight refused their request. :D
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Kunda1
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by Kunda1 »

Hi NormandC! Nice to see you on the forum (sorry it's about the PPA). Look, I'm for the PPA (and consider it superior to Snap packaging). The issue is that no one has stepped up 'enough' to maintain it. I've initiated a ping to yorik to talk about and still waiting a reply. Thank for you input and also the tip about cleaning up the permissions list.
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NormandC
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by NormandC »

Whatever Yorik and you end up deciding, please don't delete the PPAs (stable and daily) altogether. If you come up to this decision, I'd like to be advised first. I'm not making any promises, but I may try to look into it in the coming months if nobody steps in. For now, cycling season is not over yet so there's no way I'm gluing myself indoors in front of a computer display during daylight if it's not to pay the bills. There will be a few weeks of waiting before there's enough snow for fatbiking season to start. :D

Changing the description on the Launchpad page to an announcement saying "we are looking for a maintainer", with a link to this topic and to @wandererfan's bounty proposal might elicit more responses from FreeCAD users who happen to be PPA packagers but not community members.

I might also mention that on older Ubuntu releases (18.04 LTS in my case), the daily builds PPA still works beautifully, even though I had to manually install new dependencies for the Addon Manager. I haven't tried to use it yet.
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