The PPA is needing maintenance and an update especially for the upcoming v0.20 release. We need volunteers to help keep the PPA working that entails:
Responding to bug reports filed on launchpad, forum, githubetc…
Responding to notices from other maintainers or FC devs/triagers regarding packaging issues/quirks
Opening/monitoring bugs to/in upstream repos especially in the Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem
I’d like to acknowledge the current maintainer kkremitzki, has done a great job + also joining the Debian Science team and helping to keep 3rdbparty deps up-to-date in the Debian ecosystem that trickles down to many other derivatives. And, we need more help.
Please respond to this thread if you have interest in this volunteer effort. Thank you!
Are we sure we need PPAs ? I’ve never liked them, too unreliable. FreeCAD already has AppImages, can be quite easily compiled from source … what benefit would PPA give ? I vote for dropping them entirely: it’s better to do few things well than many things badly.
+1 given the current state, they were useful for people running ubuntu when they worked well, now we even have the snap and flatpak if you don’t like the inconvenience of the appimage. It just doesn’t look like it’s worth the trouble maintaining packages for 4 versions of ubuntu at a time (I don’t run ubuntu so there is some bias here).
IMO that’s another point in favor of disabling ppa if it can’t even make usable binaries.
A lot of those aren’t using ubuntu exactly because of that though so the subset in question is even smaller. I too dislike snaps, luckily there is also flatpak, appimage and conda available, users are free to chose and if none those seem suitable they can compile locally or are welcome to step up and maintain the ppa, in the meantime it might be better to not offer a broken and unmaintained package IMO.
As I understand it, the Launchpad processing provides both the PPA and the packages that are used in Debian based distributions other than Ubuntu.
The PPA for the stable release is not required IF the version in the Ubuntu repositories is correct, which has not been the case historically. The PPA for the daily development version COULD be retired if the AppImage, Snap, Flatpack, etc versions are a reliable and timely alternative.
AppImage and Snap have worked for me when I’ve used them, but since I mostly use local builds, I am not a qualified judge.
In any case, the whole process of packaging FreeCAD is heavy and very time-consuming. And this multiplies by each platform “we” (whoever that is ) support. So supporting another platform is something not easy nor automatic. I would say our primary goal is what we already have: We offer one “preferred” way for windows, mac and linux. The rest is more like icing on the cake… If we can, we do it of course, but I don’t think we are failing if we can´t.
What about starting by creating an issue that describes the “job” as best as we can, then we try to lure in interested volunteers? EDIT Forget that, just saw wandererfan 's other post now. Great!!
As there is no long line of persons to make PPA. I could start doing them but I have to learn little bit more how to compile on Launchpad as I’m more aware of using Debian Salsa and OBS (openSUSE build system). I’m oldschool user and prefer more PPA over SNAP (All though SNAP is also nice but there is already AppImage.). I already build my own RPM version of FreeCAD (as I like to use some libs that are not on openSUSE package) so I know it’s very big and hard to get right.
