How to build calibre in Debian Sid?

[tompe]

The web page says Debian Sid is supported but it also says that Python 2.6 is required. From what I can see 2.6 is not in Debian Sid. Am I missing something?

[kovidgoyal]

There should be a .deb of calibre you can use in debian sid

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

There should be a .deb of calibre you can use in debian sid

I did nor see it on the web page but I will look again.

So when you say Debian Sid is supported you do not mean that you can build it?

[tompe]

Do you mean the binary installation method? I cannot find the deb file...

[kovidgoyal]

Supported means that there is a binary package of calibre maintained by that distribution's maintainers. Bulding calibre from source typically requires more.

EDIT: See for example http://groups.google.com/group/linux...lnk=raot&pli=1

[tompe]

Stupid of me not to check if the package was in the distribution...

Should the binary install method work in Debian Sid if I want to install the latest version?

And why do you require newer packages then the ones available in unstable? Is it really necessary? I wanted to compile things myself to be able to patch code or fix bugs.

[tompe]

The debian package depends on an Ubuntu specific package (python-mechanize) so is it really possible to use the package in Debian Sid? I do not like to mix distributions.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by tompe

Should the binary install method work in Debian Sid if I want to install the latest version?

And why do you require newer packages then the ones available in unstable? Is it really necessary? I wanted to compile things myself to be able to patch code or fix bugs.

Yeah the binary install is (largely) distro independent

It is really neccessary, calibre uses cutting edge features of a lot of libraries, in fact as I often make a habit of submitting patches for bug fixes or new features to the maintainers of libraries that calibre uses, even the cutting edge ones are often not enough, hence the binary installer.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Yeah the binary install is (largely) distro independent

I got that to work.

It is really neccessary, calibre uses cutting edge features of a lot of libraries, in fact as I often make a habit of submitting patches for bug fixes or new features to the maintainers of libraries that calibre uses, even the cutting edge ones are often not enough, hence the binary installer.

OK, I was only interested in the command line programs and the possibility to fix the code but maybe they also require the latest versions.

Personally I try to use the versions of programs that are in common distributions because I think it is a great advantage if people can build the application without much trouble. This of course has the disadvantage that you might have to work around bugs and other limitations that are fixed in later versions.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by tompe

Personally I try to use the versions of programs that are in common distributions because I think it is a great advantage if people can build the application without much trouble. This of course has the disadvantage that you might have to work around bugs and other limitations that are fixed in later versions.

Well Debian is particularly bad, on a more up to date distro like say Gentoo ~ (which is what I use) the calibre source tree builds just fine. Even on Ubuntu Jaunty if you install the dev packages it will build, though certain parts will not work/have bugs because of the older libraries.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Well Debian is particularly bad, on a more up to date distro like say Gentoo ~ (which is what I use) the calibre source tree builds just fine. Even on Ubuntu Jaunty if you install the dev packages it will build, though certain parts will not work/have bugs because of the older libraries.

Aha, I thought Debian Unstable usually used the same versions as other distributions that tries to use the latest.

I tried to build in Debian Unstable but got some problem with qt2 stuff.