Linux distribution

[AlexandrePTJ]

AppImage is used to distribute kemai on Linux. It seems to be a good idea but several issues with AppImage / Qt / SSL / libc makes me reconsider this.

I do not want to support several packaging method, so I have to explore available solutions.

[virtulis]

Flatpak seems to be the least controversial "bundling" method overall, but of course the best solution is distro-specific packages (which don't have to be made by you!).

On that topic, I made an AUR "package" (unofficial script to build and install from upstream sources): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/kemai-git (it's my first one!)

And one issue I had was that CMake really wanted to install header files for the "fetched" dependencies globally (which would conflict with actual packages providing those). Thankfully there is a flag to force it to FindPackage instead of Fetch, but I wonder if there's a better way to deal with this on the upstream side.

[AlexandrePTJ]

I will look at Flatpak, however I am considering providing a .deb for the last debian (or Ubuntu)
In my opinion, as long as software are opensource, it is better to be distro-specific.

@virtulis, thanks you for the AUR package :) Which flags are you talking about ?

[virtulis]

In my opinion, as long as software are opensource, it is better to be distro-specific.

I agree. While this is a "non-developer" piece of software so setting it up should be easy, from my experience as a user it doesn't really work very well anyway when packaging is done by the people who don't actually use the OS daily.

Even for Debian/Ubuntu I'm not sure standalone .deb packages are a good idea, since that doesn't handle updates and might interfere with the updates of the OS itself due to outdated dependencies. I don't use Flatpak myself but as I understand the whole point of it is to isolate the package from the OS as much as possible.

Which flags are you talking about ?

In PKGBUILD I added these CMake flags:

    -DFETCHCONTENT_FULLY_DISCONNECTED=ON \
    -DFETCHCONTENT_TRY_FIND_PACKAGE_MODE=ALWAYS \

What this basically does is turn every FetchContent_* into find_package instead, which are then supplied from Arch repos and AUR via depends/makedepends lists. (I put range-v3 and magic_enum in makedepends since they seem to be header only)

Main reason I did that is because I wanted to use cmake --install to package exactly what you chose to install (because you probably know better than me, and might change it later). And CMake was very eager to install all those extra fetched packages as well, into /usr/include etc. There's probably a way to just exclude them from the install target but CMakeLists is a labyrinth to me (despite having dealt with it many times). And I do get it that it's easier to just fetch them instead of making the build instructions harder.

Now spdlog you should probably just tell the user to install from their repos. Especially since it looks dynamically linked.

[AlexandrePTJ]

In develop branch, I have added an option KEMAI_BUILD_LOCAL_DEPENDENCIES to decide if project will download and build its dependencies. Does it fit to what you expected ? @poelzi May be interested too.

[virtulis]

Sorry, I forgot to respond. Yes, it works great, thank you!