I built a reminder app but can't seem to build a deb/snap/flatpak for it, help?
#1
I built a reminder app which has been super useful since the gnome-calendar is pretty small and far from user friendly. I have been trying to make a snap/flatpak/deb file for it but have been having tons of problems with it. Can anyone here help me with it? I would prefer getting it up on snap/flatpak because this should in theory work with anything running phosh.

This is my source code:

https://gitlab.com/greenbeast/elephant_remember

Also, I haven't commented the source code super well so sorry about that, I will hopefully being doing that this week.
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#2
I think you'll have to make it a bit more portable and well behaved before packaging it for snap or flatpak. For example hardcoded paths like /home/mobian will cause sandboxing problems for users other than mobian. It will probably be easier to package if you start with a more conventional installer too - the packaging tools can handle that in a standard way rather than having to be customised.

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/python.html
https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/lat..._meta.html
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#3
(09-07-2021, 09:04 AM)wibble Wrote: I think you'll have to make it a bit more portable and well behaved before packaging it for snap or flatpak. For example hardcoded paths like /home/mobian will cause sandboxing problems for users other than mobian. It will probably be easier to package if you start with a more conventional installer too - the packaging tools can handle that in a standard way rather than having to be customised.

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/python.html
https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/lat..._meta.html

Thanks for the resources, I'll give them a read through.
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#4
I managed to almost get a flatpak working but the issue is a required library won't install with flatpak (known issue sadly) and have been trying to build a deb package but have had virtually zero success after 10+ hours. I don't get how it is seemingly so hard to just create a package.

Edit: I am now deciding I hate packaging apps in general so there's that. I did manage to package this into a deb package and would love some feedback. Though please read the Readme to get an understanding of what I am going for and the short comings.

The deb file is here https://gitlab.com/greenbeast/elephant_r...all.deb.gz so just download that and run `gunzip -d elephant-remember_0.9_all.deb.gz` in the same directory and then run `sudo apt install ./elephant-remember_0.9_all.deb` and it should install. I just did it on my PP and it worked fine.
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#5
(09-08-2021, 02:01 PM)ragreenburg Wrote: I managed to almost get a flatpak working but the issue is a required library won't install with flatpak (known issue sadly) and have been trying to build a deb package but have had virtually zero success after 10+ hours. I don't get how it is seemingly so hard to just create a package.

Edit: I am now deciding I hate packaging apps in general so there's that. I did manage to package this into a deb package and would love some feedback. Though please read the Readme to get an understanding of what I am going for and the short comings.

The deb file is here https://gitlab.com/greenbeast/elephant_r...all.deb.gz so just download that and run `gunzip -d elephant-remember_0.9_all.deb.gz` in the same directory and then run `sudo apt install ./elephant-remember_0.9_all.deb` and it should install. I just did it on my PP and it worked fine.

I would appreciate your thoughts in this unified pinephone app repository thread https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14527
as well as wish list nominating your app here https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=wishlist
and how to submit it for Mobian repos https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php...-to-mobian
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#6
(09-09-2021, 04:19 AM)biketool Wrote:
(09-08-2021, 02:01 PM)ragreenburg Wrote: I managed to almost get a flatpak working but the issue is a required library won't install with flatpak (known issue sadly) and have been trying to build a deb package but have had virtually zero success after 10+ hours. I don't get how it is seemingly so hard to just create a package.

Edit: I am now deciding I hate packaging apps in general so there's that. I did manage to package this into a deb package and would love some feedback. Though please read the Readme to get an understanding of what I am going for and the short comings.

The deb file is here https://gitlab.com/greenbeast/elephant_r...all.deb.gz so just download that and run `gunzip -d elephant-remember_0.9_all.deb.gz` in the same directory and then run `sudo apt install ./elephant-remember_0.9_all.deb` and it should install. I just did it on my PP and it worked fine.

I would appreciate your thoughts in this unified pinephone app repository thread https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14527
as well as wish list nominating your app here https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=wishlist
and how to submit it for Mobian repos https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php...-to-mobian
Thanks for those links, I'll do a bit of looking there and adding it to the repo.

Edit:
How would one get in touch with a mobian dev to get the app approved for the Mobian repo? I don't necessarily want this in the debian repo because it really is only built for phosh so I don't think it would be a great fit.
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#7
(09-09-2021, 10:58 AM)ragreenburg Wrote: (snip)

Edit:
How would one get in touch with a mobian dev to get the app approved for the Mobian repo? I don't necessarily want this in the debian repo because it really is only built for phosh so I don't think it would be a great fit.

this should help with the Debian side of things.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint...rt.en.html
I have the .deb and will install it when I have a chance, sadly I am not in a daily driver mode yet so I am not sure how good a QA I can provide, but your contributions are a part of what will push the ecosystem form a hobby gadget like my OpenMoko was to a real useful device we cna all use without feeling bad for sacrificing our open source libre software and privacy principles.
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#8
(09-09-2021, 12:58 PM)biketool Wrote:
(09-09-2021, 10:58 AM)ragreenburg Wrote: (snip)

Edit:
How would one get in touch with a mobian dev to get the app approved for the Mobian repo? I don't necessarily want this in the debian repo because it really is only built for phosh so I don't think it would be a great fit.

this should help with the Debian side of things.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint...rt.en.html
I have the .deb and will install it when I have a chance, sadly I am not in a daily driver mode yet so I am not sure how good a QA I can provide, but your contributions are a part of what will push the ecosystem form a hobby gadget like my OpenMoko was to a real useful device we cna all use without feeling bad for sacrificing our open source libre software and privacy principles.
Good news is, I just released a new version with a few nice QOL fixes and an updated deb. Thank you for the encouraging words, honestly the struggle of trying and failing to make a deb/flatpak for hours on end made me want to just throw this project aside.
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#9
(09-09-2021, 03:24 PM)ragreenburg Wrote: Good news is, I just released a new version with a few nice QOL fixes and an updated deb. Thank you for the encouraging words, honestly the struggle of trying and failing to make a deb/flatpak for hours on end made me want to just throw this project aside.

This is why we need a centralized and well documented/flowcharted way to Pinephone compatible apps with many examples even some video probably.  It gets tricky because this is not x86, or AMD64 but a special build for every other device that the OSs support, which complicates things.  So far I ahve been convinced that Flatpak is probably the way to go.  I can only cheerleader and suggest solutions we come up with here, I am not a coder and I have no authority, I can help problem solve this issue which will in my opinion make or break the ecosystem and ultimately the success of the Pine mobile hardware platforms.
The success of the apple phone OS, Googles moble OS, Symbian, even Maemo Linux and WebOS Linux were ultimately usable because they had both a fully populated set of basic function apps as well as the accessory apps to cover most needs as are found in all of the above OSs.  The fully populated 'app store' was strongly supported I know especially in the case of Palm and Nokia as basic competitive survival strategies.

I will try to get in contact with the big Pine related OS's communities(Manjaro, Mobian, and Postmarkett); I think UBports is too far off to join) and gauge their interest.  We already have the offer of support from Pine64 but it has to be our effort and then ask for resources as needed.
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#10
(09-10-2021, 02:04 AM)biketool Wrote:
(09-09-2021, 03:24 PM)ragreenburg Wrote: Good news is, I just released a new version with a few nice QOL fixes and an updated deb. Thank you for the encouraging words, honestly the struggle of trying and failing to make a deb/flatpak for hours on end made me want to just throw this project aside.

This is why we need a centralized and well documented/flowcharted way to Pinephone compatible apps with many examples even some video probably.  It gets tricky because this is not x86, or AMD64 but a special build for every other device that the OSs support, which complicates things.  So far I ahve been convinced that Flatpak is probably the way to go.  I can only cheerleader and suggest solutions we come up with here, I am not a coder and I have no authority, I can help problem solve this issue which will in my opinion make or break the ecosystem and ultimately the success of the Pine mobile hardware platforms.
The success of the apple phone OS, Googles moble OS, Symbian, even Maemo Linux and WebOS Linux were ultimately usable because they had both a fully populated set of basic function apps as well as the accessory apps to cover most needs as are found in all of the above OSs.  The fully populated 'app store' was strongly supported I know especially in the case of Palm and Nokia as basic competitive survival strategies.

I will try to get in contact with the big Pine related OS's communities(Manjaro, Mobian, and Postmarkett); I think UBports is too far off to join) and gauge their interest.  We already have the offer of support from Pine64 but it has to be our effort and then ask for resources as needed.

I think you are absolutely right. The issue is for a Phosh app you kinda want to use Gtk since it is native and I wrote my app in python but there isn't a ton of resources out there to get help. I tried making a UT app a year or so ago but they use Clickable which has not great documentation which made it hard to understand anything and is the reason I never made that app. If you want a mobile ecosystem to succeed you need to make it easy for people to make apps, simple as that. The biggest reason people stop using the PP (aside from it being slow) is that it doesn't have the apps most people need/use in their day to day lives and if we don't get good documentation on how to make those apps then it will stop people from using the OS.
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