Quote:
Originally Posted by frmald
Ah, so an isolated install, which is the only way to get calibre to NOT make unknowable modifications to the filesystem (short of chroot / pbuilder / overlayfs or other expensive jailing options) is not a "proper installation"? Good to know.
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Code:
staging_root=/tmp/calibre-staging-root/usr
# xdg-utils requires various directories to exist rather than creating them, even ones it doesn't even use
mkdir -p "$staging_root"/share/{applications,desktop-directories,icons/hicolor,mime/packages}
XDG_DATA_DIRS="$staging_root"/share XDG_UTILS_INSTALL_MODE=system /opt/calibre/calibre_postinstall --root="$staging_root"
This will run without root privileges and install all "unknowable modifications" to your chosen --root.
Linux distro packagers would know this as analogous to $DESTDIR.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frmald
I also particularly like this on the calibre install page: "You can uninstall calibre by running sudo calibre-uninstall. Alternately, simply deleting the installation directory will remove 99% of installed files"
Meaning, if my system hangs, or if there's a bug, I have to trust a non-distribution script to pick up its own trash, without any proper recourse to forcibly remove everything it "improved" on my system.
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You don't need to like it... it is true. You could read the source code or inspect the resulting script to verify it. Go, open source!
Quote:
Originally Posted by frmald
The calibre site itself says "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below". It sounds a bit different, doesn't it?
And yeah, I know I can run Debian testing / Sid / Ubuntu non-LTS (giving up maintainability and control over key system setup), or switch to Arch or Void or worse and give up the wealth of Debian packaging. No thanks.
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I don't see the difference you see.
As for switching to Arch "or worse", we have more AUR packages than Debian has packages, period. The supposed wealth of having sheer quantity of package numbers? Firmly on our side.
And unlike Debian we don't cheat by splitting every software project into 6+ different subpackages, thereby padding out their package count with stuff that isn't distinctive.
(Debian does this due to policy demanding the default install of a program not include development headers or docs, and further splitting many packges to enable minimal disk usage for unused features.)
But I don't see the problem here. You have an AppImage suitable for your personal use, if not anyone else's.
There were certain... inefficiencies... in your understanding of calibre's current installer, which resulted in you not realizing how easy it is to get things like desktop files, but now you know, and you sort of worked around it already anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frmald
I think appimage was around before all the other fads. And that's the point of providing a clean appimage recipe -- not having to trust some "random dude".
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The first fad is still a fad, though.
If you're not going to trust some random dude, but go to all the effort of setting up an appimage build recipe *and* downloading calibre's binary tarball, why not just stick with the tarball, manually extracted? The AppImage recipe provides nothing in addition to the tarball, other than a manually copied .desktop file, which could be used without AppImage...
This entire thing seems to be some sort of paranoia that the calibre-uninstall script, which is fairly well behaved, is somehow very untrustworthy and leaves "trash" behind.