Ubuntu PPA out of date?

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BigBrown
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Joined: Sun Jun 16, 2019 12:21 am

Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by BigBrown »

Is the Ubuntu PPA being maintained anymore? The current I'm seeing in the nightlys is from 2 months ago.
Woodstock
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by Woodstock »

I believe that the only Linux "nightly build" now is the flatpak, because it is usable by more people.
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

I still have a VM that runs ubuntu nightly builds, but I don't pay a lot of attention to it. It's been down for a while. I just kicked it back to life, so updates should appear again.

But as Woodstock points out, the flatpak is a better option. And as of yesterday, we are also distributing a flatpak plugin that provides everything that is required to make QSV encoding work on linux.
RogueScholar
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by RogueScholar »

Much obliged for restarting the build server for the Launchpad PPA, @JohnAStebbins, I'd been wondering why the updates had ceased but chalked it up to possible build failures from recent commits or some other development headache. I have a laptop with a smallish SSD running HandBrake like a champ (it's nearly as responsive running Kubuntu as my new ThinkServer with a Xeon E3 running Windows 10 despite being a humble ThinkPad T420s from 2011) that I'd really loathe having to switch to the Flatpak distribution on due to the massive storage overhead for the runtimes.

Could I prevail upon you to add a disco (Ubuntu 19.04) release to your configuration on it? As for the QSV plugin, any chance it might be added to the PPA build server as well? I respect every dev team's right to choose the distribution method that best suits their workflow and don't want to bother you with my argument for native packages vs. Flatpak, but even on my newer machines I much prefer to manage everything via apt. I would gladly craft the Debian packaging files to try and minimize the time investment needed, if that would help.

Thanks again.
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

due to the massive storage overhead for the runtimes
That is a one time thing. Runtimes are shared between flatpak apps, so if you run multiple flatpaks (as I do) the overhead is nominal.
Could I prevail upon you to add a disco (Ubuntu 19.04) release to your configuration on it?
I honestly didn't realize yet another Ubuntu release was out there. I don't follow Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora. Yes, I'll add 19.04.
As for the QSV plugin, any chance it might be added to the PPA build server as well?
No. The QSV MediaSDK flatpak plugin consists of a particular collection of libraries that are known to work together. Some of these would replace packages from the official Ubuntu repository. If A user updated some parts and not others they can very easily end up with non-working QSV. There are multiple things that can go wrong (I think I tripped over about a dozen of them while working on the flatpak plugin) and most of them have pretty much the same symptoms. So it's not easy to determine what is broken in someone's system configuration when QSV doesn't work.

This is also one of the reasons I prefer flatpak for distributing HandBrake. I know that what the user is getting is exactly what I built and tested, all the way down to the system libraries.
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

Another reason to prefer flatpak. I wouldn't have to follow any distros release schedule and create new HandBrake builds for every new distro release. Imagine how much more actual work on HandBrake I could do if I could get rid of these janitorial chores :mrgreen:
BigBrown
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by BigBrown »

My belated thanks to JohnAStebbins. I've started a new job and haven't been keeping up as I should have. I hadn't realized that the flatpaks were the current way to go. I will have to go and get it a try. Thanks for your help.
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

I hadn't realized that the flatpaks were the current way to go.
I've been easing them in. Doing a fairly soft push to get people to switch. I'll still be producing Ubuntu releases for quite some time I think. But the flatpaks let me address all the rest of the linux distros that I've never had a good answer for before. The flatpak will be my first priority, so it's likely to be available soonest when new releases are put out. And as noted above, when Ubuntu does a new release, the old flatpak will continue to work, which can't necessarily be said for old PPA packages.
RogueScholar
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by RogueScholar »

Thanks for your reply, @JohnAStebbins. Your contention about the storage overhead being distributed amongst all installed installed flatpaks doesn't exactly line up with my experience, though. Some use the freedesktop runtime, others use GNOME and still others use KDE, and all three have no fewer than three versions in use currently. Yours for instance uses the old Freedesktop version 1.6 runtime while the two flatpaks I currently have installed (begrudgingly) use the current 18.08 version of that runtime, so I'd need to install the older runtime version just to use the Handbrake flatpak, resulting in nearly 1GiB of files between package+runtime, so I'll gratefully continue to use the PPA as long as you're gracious enough to keep it accessible.

To that end, I wanted to call your attention to a package change in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories that affects Handbrake's build dependencies for Ubuntu Disco and the imminent Debian Buster release (their successors too, of course). You may have already noticed that the git-snapshots PPA builds for Disco have been failing over an inability to meet that dependency. libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev from the webkitgtk source package has finally been officially deprecated and removed from the official repositories for both distros, superseded by libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev (the new parent source package is webkit2gtk), necessitating an update to your debian/control file or porting the old source package to Disco/Buster.

I believe changing the relevant part of the Build-Depends field from "libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev" to "libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev | libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev" should resolve the issue, at least from the debuild perspective. It also looks like adding libfdk-aac-dev might help. I'm not familiar enough with CMake to know if it's reliant on pkg-config to query and locate installed libraries, but if so, that part may also require some tweaking as the .pc file to query is now webkit2gtk-4.0.pc instead of webkitgtk-3.0.pc. Hopefully the changes are mostly superficial for you; I'm part of a couple projects currently having to port "under duress" to newer libraries and I know how squirrelly it can get.

That library might not even be needed anymore as a quick check of the handbrake source packages in both official package repositories shows they have never specified libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev as a Build-Dependency, so maybe just making a copy of debian/control without it and re-uploading is all that's needed. Comparing their control files with yours, I spot the following differences (ditching the debian/compat file and using the debhelper-compat dependency is amazingly helpful in my experience):

Code: Select all

Standards-Version: 4.3.0
Build-Depends: debhelper-compat (= 11), libgudev-1.0-dev [linux-any], python
Added to their control file are these (obviously most of them because you build a lot of your own dependent libraries instead of using pre-packaged ones, but the libdbus and yasm ones might serve a purpose I don't understand and be worth adding, likewise trading in autoconf/autotools-dev for automake):

Code: Select all

Build-Depends:  automake,
		libavcodec-dev (>= 7:4.1~),
		libavfilter-dev (>= 7:4.1~),
		libavformat-dev (>= 7:4.1~),
		libavutil-dev (>= 7:4.1~),
		libbluray-dev (>= 1:1.0.0),
		libdbus-glib-1-dev,
		libdvdnav-dev (>= 4.9.0),
		libdvdread-dev (>= 4.2.0+20120521),
		libmpeg2-4-dev,
		libswresample-dev (>= 7:4.1~),
		libswscale-dev (>= 7:4.1~),
		libx265-dev,
		yasm (>= 1.2)
Removed altogether in their control file are these:

Code: Select all

Build-Depends:  autoconf,
		autotools-dev,
		libdrm-dev,
		libfribidi-dev (>= 0.19.0),
		libnotify-dev,
		libnuma-dev
		libtool-bin,
		libva-dev,
		libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev,
		zlib1g-dev
Looks like some of those are due to their decision to build the official packages with these additional flags set (that --disable-nvenc is the original reason I went looking for a better package and delightfully found your PPA, haha):

Code: Select all

--build build --debug=std --disable-fdk-aac --disable-nvenc --enable-x265 --disable-df-fetch --disable-df-verify
Hope some of this helps you sort out the issue, and thanks again for firing up the snapshot PPA.
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Ubuntu PPA out of date?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

webkit definitely isn't needed. I should have removed it from the build deps long ago.

launchpad used to send me email when a build fails. I don't seem to be getting those for this latest failure. I've updated the control file to remove webkit. I'll check it's status tomorrow to see if that resolves all build issues.
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