Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
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How do you know that? Without more debugging output it might just be that the plugin requires a newer Calibre. That's not 'botched', that's 'don't use a version of Calibre from a location which specializes in stability if what you need is a feature not available in the old stable version'. This sort of "don't randomly upgrade and risk breaking stuff that already works" is what many Linux distributions are *for*. In particular, what distros usually guarantee is that stuff you install *from a distribution* works with other stuff *from that distribution*. Not being psychics, distro maintainers obviously do not and cannot guarantee that things from the distribution work with random plugins downloaded from random places on the Internet, which is what the attached poster is trying to do.
The problem here is really Calibre: it has no real versioning in its plugin interface, so it cannot determine that a plugin needs a later version of Calibre, or tell the user that, or say what version it needs. (This is, frankly, a neophyte software engineering error. And yes the last part can be done without precognition.)
(Downloading stuff from random places on the Internet, rather than getting it from the distro, is fairly terrifying to a Linux user, and frankly should be fairly terrifying to anyone who uses computers in this day and age: who knows what's in it? Calibre plugins can execute arbitrary code: do you have time to read the code and make sure it's not doing all sorts of nefarious stuff? The packages in the distro, you don't need to be worried about... the distro is a curated source. That's what it's *for*.)
If you want a bleeding-edge distro, use one of those: they usually have much more recent Calibres (and much more recent everything elses, and more breakage of things that previously worked as a consequence).
If you want to use bleeding-edge stuff downloaded from random places on the Internet, I'd agree that (given Calibre's plugin API design errors), using the latest upstream Calibre is probably necessary. But that's not the distros' fault, and it's not a sign that distro repos are in any way broken. They're doing precisely what they're designed for. The fault here is Calibre's poor plugin API and a design that expects to download code from random places on the internet with no signing or even hash verification: all you get is a warning that ooh this might be dangerous. In the modern world this sort of thing is just not anywhere close to adequate. I'm frankly amazed that nobody has exploited this to replace a popular plugin and attack Calibre users en masse yet: probably Calibre is too niche for the attackers to bother with (God knows what user figure that might be, I'm not an attacker: five million users? fifty?)