Hi Matt, Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org> writes: > On 5/18/20 4:14 PM, Nicholas D Steeves wrote: > >> Recent versions of Calibre require qtbase5-dev (>= 5.12), buster (Debian >> 10) has 5.11.3+dfsg1-1+deb10u3, and a backport of Qt5 would break all >> Qt5-using packages in buster. Unfortunately this means there will be no >> further backports of Calibre, and the existing package is technically in >> violation of backports policy. > > I couldn't find anything in the upstream or debian changelogs that > indicate why this versioned debian dependency was added. Here's the > commit for the change > > https://github.com/norbusan/calibre-debian/commit/1041f > > which says > > cleanup build and run deps > > - unify the layout: first specific, followed by common deps > for both build and run > - add several items to build deps since we do unit testing now > - remove versions that are not available in Debian anymore > > Probably there was a reason? But has anyone tried building with older? > In the upstream source, in ./bypy/sources.json I see > > "name": "qt-base", > "version": "5.14.1", > "hashes": { > "unix": > "sha256:d9d423a6e7bcf1055c0372fc029f14a6fe67dd62c67b83095cde68b60b762cf7" > } > > > but it comes from upstream that way, not debian. > Yes, IIRC I attempted to build against buster's Qt early in 2020, but by then calibre-reader had already begun to depend on (IIRC) new qtwebkit things. I'm not sure if disabling compilation of calibre-reader would do the trick, because I assume qtwebkit is used elsewhere; 'could be wrong about this... I'm also not sure if Calibre can be patched to use alternative Qt 5.11 functionality; upstream would probably complain if we did this, and I worry we'd have a new class of Debian-specific bugs. If compilation of calibre-reader can be disabled, then a hypothetical solution might be to split the package, create an x-ebook-reader using the alternative system, add Provides for this to various packages, and then backport those. It's a lot of work for a purposefully unintegrating (upstream will say "breaking") Calibre, but IIRC there's a wishlist bug for a standalone calibre-reader, so this might be an acceptable Debianish option if it wouldn't be a nightmare to maintain (I also worry this solution would be buggy). Do you know if there would be problems with a flatpack in combination with apparmor? Specifically I'm worried that dbus, udisk, and USB plug and unplug detection will break. It seems like it has greater chances of success than a statically linked unofficial deb, because I seem to remember reading that this is a case flatpack is supposed to handle gracefully. If anyone would like to help with realising a solution, I'd welcome it :-) Best, Nicholas
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