Packaging for & installation on Debian Testing

[antoinecellerier]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Opening this per the discussion in #342 with @mryel00 . No apt sources are currently available for Debian testing (as of this date Debian testing is Forky, which will be assigned version number 14 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_release_version_history ). Also the current install script in tools/libs/manage_apps.sh downloads sources based on a VERSION_ID field in os-release which seems to only be populated on Debian stable installs.

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally packages would be provided for testing, and also automatically resolve in the install script if running Debian unstable. Given VERSION_ID is not provided systematically, it would be safer to rely on the VERSION_CODENAME to name the sources download file.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Alternatively, having the fallback installation script also build camera-streamer and spyglass would be one way to support installs on distributions or versions which the mainsail project doesn't provide packages for.

Additional information

No response

[mryel00]

As mentioned in said discussion, it will still take some time to implement and test this.

A quick manual solution for camera-streamer is manual compilation and placing the binary in ~/crowsnest/bin/camera-streamer. Crowsnest will always prefer binaries in it's own bin folder.
For spyglass you need either a custom script named spyglass forwarding parameters to run.py with a separate venv inside ~/crowsnest/bin/spyglassor install all dependencies into the python venv of crowsnest and place the spyglass repo into ~/crowsnest/bin/spyglass.

Some additional information to be transparent

camera-streamer often needs fixes in the code with new libcamera versions. Depending on the update interval on PiOS unstable, this could create a lot of workload on my end to maintain a working state of a packaged version with latest libcamera package on unstable. This can and will influence my decision on adding such a precompiled package.

About the mentioned alternatives

build [...] spyglass

Spyglass is pretty easy to add in this regard and would need one of the previous mentioned methods in the installer.

build camera-streamer

I will not add such a thing.
On non PiOS camera-streamer has no WebRTC support therefore it has no benefits over ustreamer.
On PiOS there are often issues as soon as there is a libcamera update. After a libcamera update camera-streamer might no longer work and you need to recompile again. Therefore I will not add support again for manual camera-streamer compilation inside the installation script, as it will throw non trivial errors.