Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

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NormandC
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by NormandC »

Hi,
wandererfan wrote: Tue Jun 28, 2022 5:35 pm As I understand it, the Launchpad processing provides both the PPA and the packages that are used in Debian based distributions other than Ubuntu.
Not exactly.

Kurt centralized the Debian packaging for both the Launchpad PPA and the official Debian package on Salsa, which is the official Debian Git repository.

Official Debian packages are built solely from the Salsa repo. Launchpad PPA packages are built independently from the Launchpad infrastructure. The Salsa git repo is imported into lp:freecad and synced 4 times a day.

As I suggested previously, since getting push permissions (or getting PRs merged timely) to Salsa may prove problematic, I would sever the Salsa to Launchpad connection and take a few steps backwards to reduce the complexity. I guess Kurt wouldn't agree, but pledging to become the FC PPA maintainer and the Debian package maintainer at the same time seems like a tall order to me.
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NormandC
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by NormandC »

adrianinsaval wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 1:50 pm The mere fact that the package has been broken for months but still nobody seems to understand how the process actually works or how it may be fixed suggest it's not that polished or very well integrated.
The Debian packaging process is extremely well documented by the Debian people.

There is also useful info on PPA packaging (it's slightly different from Debian's way) on the Launchpad website.

But one has to be willing to do the grunt work to learn it.

Granted, with such a complicated - one might say arcane - process (let's not forget that Debian is one of the oldest Linux distros), the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem, and with newer, simpler cross-distro packaging systems having come forward in later years, it's not very inviting.

While I was content to stay in my little sandbox when I was in charge of the FreeCAD PPA (around 2011-2015), Kurt followed the Debian packaging process to the letter, and he even became a Debian Science Maintainer in charge of many MCAD/FEM packages. To casually suggest that his work isn't that polished is extremely unfair to Kurt's work (and quite arrogant), and it does not take into account the growing complexity of FreeCAD and its intricate dependencies.
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adrianinsaval
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by adrianinsaval »

NormandC wrote: Mon Oct 24, 2022 3:16 am While I was content to stay in my little sandbox when I was in charge of the FreeCAD PPA (around 2011-2015), Kurt followed the Debian packaging process to the letter, and he even became a Debian Science Maintainer in charge of many MCAD/FEM packages. To casually suggest that his work isn't that polished is extremely unfair to Kurt's work (and quite arrogant), and it does not take into account the growing complexity of FreeCAD and its intricate dependencies.
note that I'm not blaming kurt here, the guy has done a lot of work and let's not forget mostly for free (he has a patreon but we all know that doesn't cover what someone would actually charge for a job like that), launchpad is awful and the debian packaging system itself seems to jump through a lot of hoops.
Granted, with such a complicated - one might say arcane - process (let's not forget that Debian is one of the oldest Linux distros), the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem, and with newer, simpler cross-distro packaging systems having come forward in later years, it's not very inviting.
here's the big problem IMO, it's a lot of work first to understand the system, then a lot of work to get it working on multiple versions and there's not much incentive considering we already have several choices that work on all relevant versions and not just of ubuntu, as a packaging contributor I'm only interested on working on distro agnostic solutions or in packages for the distro I'm using, on arch it's easy because you don't have to target a certain version, on ubuntu you have to target a specific version and people would ask you tu support at least 3 versions at a time and some would probably ask to support more, that's not something I would want to get involved with.
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yorik
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by yorik »

In any case I think we saw enough people saying "don't close the PPA" so we shouldn't close it. But we definitely need a maintainer.

Maybe we should start by enumerating the points and steps that would need to be done/cared about? That could maybe help people to volunteer...

I'd start maybe with

1) Be able to successfully compile FreeCAD at home
2) Have a launchpad account
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wandererfan
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by wandererfan »

yorik wrote: Wed Oct 26, 2022 7:13 am 1) Be able to successfully compile FreeCAD at home
2) Have a launchpad account
3) familiarity with debian control files and package building tools (such as dpkg and its helpers)
4) familiarity with launchpad process to build packages from recipes

see also https://www.forum.freecadweb.org/viewto ... 42&t=69858
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Kunda1
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by Kunda1 »

Damn..having trouble logging in to Ubuntu account
Alone you go faster. Together we go farther
Please mark thread [Solved]
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NormandC
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by NormandC »

wandererfan wrote: Wed Oct 26, 2022 1:36 pm
yorik wrote: Wed Oct 26, 2022 7:13 am 1) Be able to successfully compile FreeCAD at home
2) Have a launchpad account
3) familiarity with debian control files and package building tools (such as dpkg and its helpers)
4) familiarity with launchpad process to build packages from recipes

see also https://www.forum.freecadweb.org/viewto ... 42&t=69858
Hi guys,

Uh, if you list things as prerequisites that way, you might as well delete the PPA right now, you're going to scare everybody off! ;)

When I started maintaining the PPA back in 2010-2011, I knew absolutely nothing about packaging! But I was the one who made the request, and when you want something bad enough, well you pull up your sleeves. What helped is that Werner did the initial setup, and I picked it up from there. I was frequently asking and receiving help on the forum when I encountered issues.

Two key things to emphasize are a willingness to learn by the would-be maintainer; and that the community will help them as much as they can.

In the past few days I had a look around the Launchpad and Salsa infrastructure, and my feeling is that the situation isn't as dire as everybody seems to think. I may be overly optimistic, but the whole thing may not require much effort to put it back on track.

I was going to list what I perceived were the next steps, but I just noticed that Kurt actually produced builds on the freecad-stable PPA 10 hours ago, including for Ubuntu 22.04.

https://code.launchpad.net/~freecad-mai ... able-jammy
david69
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by david69 »

thanks Kurt for the PPA and bon retour NormandC.
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kkremitzki
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by kkremitzki »

NormandC wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 3:36 am In the past few days I had a look around the Launchpad and Salsa infrastructure, and my feeling is that the situation isn't as dire as everybody seems to think. I may be overly optimistic, but the whole thing may not require much effort to put it back on track.

I was going to list what I perceived were the next steps, but I just noticed that Kurt actually produced builds on the freecad-stable PPA 10 hours ago, including for Ubuntu 22.04.
Indeed, hopefully not. Quick summary of what I did:

- The Launchpad recipe for the stable builds currently targets the `ppa/py3only` branch, so I had to `git merge master` into that branch and fix a few merge conflicts
- Once that was done, next step was to test those builds on the targeted Ubuntu versions. I used LXD containers, but e.g. Docker would work fine here too. The general process is to push the packaging repo over, `apt install devscripts equivs`, `mk-build-deps && sudo apt install ./*.deb` to get dependencies, then `dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc` to attempt a build.
- After testing, I noticed that for Ubuntu 18.04/20.04, the build dependency on libvtk9-dev had to be reverted to libvtk7-dev, and for some reason, the PYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR had to be specified. Those quirks are now handled in a separate `ppa/py3only-vtk7` branch, with a new `freecad-stable-vtk7` Launchpad recipe to handle it.
- With those changes tested, I pushed the branches to Salsa. In the Launchpad recipes, you can see there's a repo `lp:freecad`, which mirrors the repo on Salsa every 4 hours. There's also a button for triggering an import immediately, so I did that and then started the builds

Next steps:

- Updating the Daily PPA (another process of merging master into a branch and fixing the merge commits)
- Updating the PPA's version of OpenCASCADE
- Updating other packaged dependencies in the PPAs
- Backporting VTK9 to the PPA to get rid of the quirk for Ubuntu 18.04/20.04
Like my FreeCAD work? I'd appreciate any level of support via Patreon, Liberapay, or PayPal! Read more about what I do at my blog.
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adrianinsaval
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Re: Volunteer Packagers Needed for the PPA

Post by adrianinsaval »

@kkremitzki what's the pivy situation for the ppa? does it ship it's own version? the version that is in ubuntu's repos is not compatible with python 3.10 so if freecad is built for python 3.10 there are errors, have the new dependencies that the addon manager had introduced been included in the ppa packages now? It's great to see you back in action, but really if those using the ppa want it to remain alive we need more hands on board, one guy in charge of everything is not sustainable.
Anyways, will you continue working on the ppa and debian packaging? I have some doubts/suggestion that I would like to bring to your attention later, is there some place for this or do I just write here on the forum?
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