Plugin Development

[KevinH]

No problems. We just wish the Linux distributions could come together to create a common desktop environment, gui, and package format and move to a rolling release. It would simplify so much. Arch and its derivatives like Manjaro seem like our best hope for fast updates. But there is still too much choice and that makes people uncomfortable and leads to distribution chaos.

I got involved with PowerPC linux dev in the early 90s, and I am still waiting to see something.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by philm

Sorry, nothing personal here, I just need to say it because it happens too often:
- When will be the time to ask USERS to build on Windows, like for Linux USERS? Or are we second zone citizens?

When up to date Windows installers aren't easy to provide. The rainbow of Linux distros don't make it simple at all for us to provide a binary distribution of Sigil, so we rely on the various Repo maintainers to do so for their users.

I get the frustration, but this is very much a Linux Repo maintainer problem. There is no reason Ubuntu can't offer the latest Sigil to their users. Many other distros do. Bureaucracy and dogma are most often the reasons they don't (couched in statements touting "stability").

And no, you're not second class citizens. Quite the opposite in fact. As a Linux user, you have the ability to easily build custom versions of many open-source software applications with tools that are provided by your operating system right out of the box. Windows user don't have that luxury.

I do all of my Sigil development on Linux (Kevin does his on Mac), so neither of us are Windows "homers" when it comes to this sort of thing. The only thing we might be guilty of is assuming that those who have adopted Linux has their OS of choice have a bit of an edge over Windows users when it comes to compiling stuff.

[philm]

I agree it's a Linux repo problem.
Just by curiosity, did you try AppImage since it works on everything that runs FUSE (CentOS RHEL, Suse, Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian)?
I don't know how to build an AppImage so I just wonder.

[KevinH]

AppImage requires the app to be fully relocatable. I do this for Sigil on macOS but making python itself fully drag and drop relocatable is not easy and requires some manual tweaking after a build. The same must hold for all Sigil dependencies. Not a straightforward task especially on platforms that make heavy use of build-time rpaths.

[philm]

Ah, ok, I didn't get this part of relocatable python and dependencies. I thought it was packaging everything, like Blender who comes with its own python.

[KevinH]

It does, but if the app is relocatable then everything packaged with it must be relocatable. This is straightforward with macOS Frameworks where everything is stored inside the macOS .app folder.

But the concept of Frameworks which effectively duplicate general shared libraries so that they become app specific is something almost all Linux distributions are strongly against.

This is understandable for a server os, but it is not understandable for a desktop os.

[charlweed]

I'd like to write a plugin that uses PyDictionary, which is a english language dictionary.
How do I "install" external modules so they is available to my Calibre plugin, and can be re-distributed within the zip? I typically install stuff with pip, but that does not seem correct for distributable plugins.

[KevinH]

They must be packaged inside the plugin and the plugin needs to extend the python sys path.

FWIW, you have built-in access to the hunspell spell checker and lots of hunspell dictionaries directly in the plugin. But pyDictionary is more WordNet than spellchecking dictionary. There are numerous thesaurus programs that use WordNet data directly and lots of front ends.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by charlweed

How do I "install" external modules so they is available to my Calibre plugin, and can be re-distributed within the zip?

Simply copy them to the plugin folder.
Do you want to write a plugin for Sigil or Calibre?
FYI: there's no Sigil API function for getting the word under the cursor.

[charlweed]

Thanks, I will try using the included hunspell. I'm a Python and Calibre plugin newb so I have lots of trial and error ahead.

The goal of my plugin will be to help me un-mangle a very messy Calibre library. There are hundreds of books with titles mixed into the author fields, and vice-versa. My first pass is to find authors that have several common english words in the name. Then I can inspect them to see if they are really titles, and process them further.

[KevinH]

Then this belongs in the Calibre forum not Sigil. Calibre plugins are different.

[charlweed]

oops! Sorry!