Glimpse: Release tarball

[mike-burns]

Perhaps I missed it, but is there a stable tarball for the 0.1.0 release? I see Flatpak and Windows but I'm looking for something for those of us who work with OS package managers: a release tarball with a checksum.

If it's there, then my request is to make it more clear on the downloads page; if not, can it exist please?

It looks like you're using autotools, so this should be the result of running make dist.

[LunaTheFoxgirl]

The GitHub autogenerated tarballs are on the releases page
https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse/releases

We do not currently officially support distro-specific packages, so we haven't made any make dist tarballs.

[mike-burns]

We do not currently officially support distro-specific packages, so we haven't made any make dist tarballs.

I was going to play around with what would be involved in making the OpenBSD package, but that'd (preferably) involve a make dist-style tarball: something where ./configure works out of the box and where the checksum doesn't change as GitHub changes things (the autogenerated tarballs are surprisingly inconsistent).

But I'm not sure what "we do not currently officially support distro-specific packages" means; do you mean that me making an OpenBSD package is undesirable?

[TrechNex]

No, just that we specifically don't build, maintain or host them. We encourage the wider community to do that for us, and are open to merging any code changes they might need to facilitate that. (Snapcraft is made possible that way, for example).

The reason we don't have a make dist tarball is we were only made aware that was a thing shortly before 0.1.0 released and there was no time to make the necessary updates. We could raise this as work ticket and then discuss as a project if it is small enough to resolve in a bug-fix release or if it needs to be pushed out to 0.2.0.

[mike-burns]

Thank you for the explanation -- that makes total sense. I'd love to see a tarball for 0.2.0; is there something I can do to help that happen?

[TrechNex]

Possibly. Basically we would need to gain an understanding of what make dist does so we know if there are Glimpse-specific changes we need to make to that. Also steps in INSTALL.in relate to the upstream release tarball so it would also be useful to know how that needs to be changed.

My own knowledge of Linux/BSD packaging is fairly minimal (I've used rpmbuild before, but that's about it!) and it's proved to be one of the more time-consuming activities, so I've been grateful so far for the people who've come in to do that for our project :)

(Also, if you do need changes to support BSD at a later date I would be very enthusiastic about adding those. It's something people have asked us to support a few times!)

[mike-burns]

That's encouraging, thank you!

I cloned the repo to try a make dist myself (honestly, I want a full make distcheck) but ran into library incompatibilities (I'm one version of OpenBSD behind stable. My bad). I'll have to try again when it's not Sunday night.

Future me, or other OpenBSD users:

export AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.14
export AUTOCONF_VERSION=2.69
export CC=clang
export CXX=clang++
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include -I/usr/X11R6/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib" 
./autogen.sh --enable-gtk-doc --without-gvfs --without-webkit
gmake V=1
gmake distcheck

[TrechNex]

If it helps you can also find the "known good" dependency versions for BABL, GEGL and MyPaint in HACKING.

[TrechNex]

Thank you for those changes. @bochecha reported on the Matrix channels that make distcheck may not work with the current upstream code either atm, so tagging this to #243 so we remember to check their bug tracker on this.

[mike-burns]

Thanks for the tip to look upstream; it seems people are working on distcheck there: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/merge_requests/173

I'm running into all sorts of check and distcheck issues in the po directory. One of them is that /bin/true is hardcoded in various spots (configure.ac, po/Makefile.in.in, po-windows-installer/Makefile.in.in), but it's spelled /usr/bin/true on OpenBSD (and, it seems, other OSes).

The fact is, if make distcheck works for you maintainers, then you'll be able to create a release tarball with confidence. It doesn't matter as much whether it works for me. So I'm going on punt on playing with distcheck for now.

[TrechNex]

For 0.1.2 I'm going to have to do this manually, but for 0.2.0 we will hopefully have an automated Jenkins job for it.

cc @chaomodus as they're doing the server provisioning these days :)

[TrechNex]

I had to make one last fix for 6d19844 to ensure make dist worked, but otherwise it went without a hitch for this release: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse/releases/tag/v0.1.2