[OpenSUSE] Problems packaging due to missing dependencies

[pallaswept]

Hi there,

I just recently heard about this terminal emulator and it looked nice so I took the appimage for a spin. "Oh hey it's a fast modern terminal WITH a scrollbar!?". So I tried to install the package for my distro (openSUSE TW) but the package is dead. "No problem, I do a lot of packaging, I'll fix it for everyone..."... And things went poorly. I thought I should provide some feedback.

The first stumbling block for me was utempter. That one was pretty easy, I found the cmake var to disable that. But then I needed reflection-cpp and boxed-cpp, and they're also unavailable. Now of course there are several approaches to this, and historically on suse it seems that was to package those libs especially for this terminal, but those have been removed since, so now we can't build this.

I thought that I should let you know that these deps can be a problem downstream. Maybe it might be possible to use different libs to provide those features? Probably a long-term thing if it's even possible, I'm just keeping you in the loop. Hope that helps.

Thanks!

[whisperity]

boxed-cpp and reflection-cpp both should be available in source code form at least on GitHub as sibling repositories of this one. Last time I checked they were mostly header-only C++ anyway, so if you pull the code to the right location, it should be easy to trick the build into accepting it.

libunicode will be a harder problem to crack.

How come the packages "have been removed since"? Is there a cleanup routine in SUSE for "dead" packages?

[Yaraslaut]

Please note that we also have scripts/install-deps.sh script that will ensure that everything is installed on the system to compile, we also have an option to enable CPM to fetch dependencies

[pallaswept]

Honestly I'm not sure what happened with this, I was late to the party. I can see that contour had a package in the 'Factory' repo (which is suse's main repo that all the usual packages are in) but it isn't there any more. The package still exists in its development repository (where the package maintainer develops the package before submitting it to Factory), which also has boxed-cpp and reflection-cpp packages (and mentions in their commit log that they are deps for contour).

I would presume that all three were added to and removed from Factory together, but I've no idea why they were removed. The dev package for contour doesn't build because it lacks the arg for utempter, and does build locally if I add it, because that repo has the dev packages for boxed and reflection, so perhaps the failing build is why it was removed, and then its deps would be removed if nothing else used them.

Normally suse are very helpful with stuff like this, I could just fix the package and then submit my fix to the dev repo, and the dev repo could push it back to Factory for everyone to have, but in this case the packages being removed from Factory means they need to be re-approved to add them back, and because of the dependencies being needed only by contour, mean that it's not one but three packages which need to be approved, which makes things a bit less smooth. I thought the best thing was to just let you know that is all a factor, because sometimes for the upstream dev it's a relatively simple refactor to use a different dependency that's more widely used.

Unfortunately the shell script isn't something we can use, because RPM packages are built in a VM with no network connection (pretty sure this applies to debian and fedora too, but possibly not COPR), so all the sources have to be present before the build.

To be clear, I'm not a representative of opensuse or an official packager or anything like that, I'm just a random Joe Schmoe who liked your terminal a lot, and helps out with packages for that distro a fair bit, trying to help out by being the middle-man to keep you in the loop about what's going on over there :)

[whisperity]

I also found this: https://software.opensuse.org/package/contour-terminal where it seems to mention the package.
But it looks to me that the SUSE package was created by a community contributor, not us.

@mantarimay seems to be pingable here at least, using the same avatar as over there, likely indicative of being the same person.

[whisperity]

I found the following thing in the "logs":

https://build.opensuse.org/requests/1140328

I am having some trouble testing the new version; even though it builds successfully, Terminal does not appear on my machine. I push issues to github. Remove it; better choice for now. Maybe next time I push it again if it is fixed.