Should we have a .deb installer? [POLL]

To make it more userfriendly, should we have a .deb installer for Linux.

To make it less hacky for non dev endusers who want to use GroundControl on a Debian-ish box

  • Yesss!
  • Meh…

0 voters

And to see on average how many people plan to use Linux as host for GroundControl in this group.

  • Yes I use Linux
  • No I don’t use Linux
  • Not yet, but I would like to
  • Sorry, I prefer WinMac

0 voters

You might rephrase that to ask for people who plan to use Linux with their Maslow. You probably don’t care that I’ve used *nix for nearly 40 years. The relevant part is that i don’t plan to use it with my router

3 Likes

You are right… :slight_smile:
Lets see how i can twist that

A little behind-the-scenes note here. When you create a poll, you have a five minute window in which you can modify poll items. After that they become immutable. I assume this is so that someone can’t create a poll and then edit the options to make the poll say whatever they want. So @vertex had to modify the text around the poll to convey what @mooselake was suggesting. An artful dodge!

1 Like

I haven’t seen @vertex on here for a while :frowning:

Thank you

IMHO, perhaps a container format like Docker might be more apropos, since there are currently changes to Ground Control almost every day. Also Ubuntu has .deb files for python, kivy, etc or can use the pyton-pip installer. Even with packaging certain Linux distributions seemed to have issues with getting a working Kivy environment for Ground Control.

1 Like

you still need to base your docker container on some distro.

I would love to see usproduce .deb packages so that people with such distros
could auto-update their systems.

True, but that’s the beauty of using containers. You could create a Docker image with Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine, or whatever. It would not not matter what distro the end user is using, they could just run in it a container.

I used Docker only as an example, could be an AppImage, FlatPak, or snap. I find AppImage very easy to try software out. For example; I use digikam to organize and tag my digital image collection. The version currently in the official Ubuntu repository is more than several versions back from what is current on there website. I could try to find a PPA that I may or may not trust and add it to my sources list and install it or simple download the appImage from there website and run it. The same goes for FreeCad, the version offered in Ubuntu was way to buggy for me, I removed it and grabbed there updated AppImage and it seems to run smoother.

I’m not against creating debian packages, we never really established what would be in it or what dependencies it would pull in and having a .deb file and a container are not mutually exclusive.

The long pole in the tent seems to be getting a working Kivy environment installed, even with .deb or rpm files, there were bugs preventing Kivy to work in recent versions of Ubuntu and Fedora. Having a virtualized container with a working Kivy build in it would have saved alot of people headaches.

what makes you think a docker container, snap, etc has any more reason to be
trusted than a PPA?

I understand the reasons for wanting things newer than what’s in the base
distro, but the right answer is to include the needed updates in the PPA or
other repo.

going to a container technology doesn’t eliminate old software or the need to do
updates.

Well, granted if the PPA is on Launchpad, I would tend to trust it and containers while not bullet proof system or security wise, its much harder for it to do harm to your system. Docker containers run segregated and are isolated from each other and the Host OS mount points are read only. Anyway thats not the point I was trying to make.

I’m curious what would your PPA offer? Would it be simply packaged GroundControl and firmware and not worry about anything upstream or would you include Kivy somehow. What about folks running Fedora, Arch, or other non-debian distros that can’t use your repo?

With all respect, Im sure people would benefit from a repository you are proposing, but a container would include a larger audience.

Heres a Dockerfile example that creates a kivy installation in 31 lines of code.

https://hub.docker.com/r/madleech/rpi-kivy/

Most of the python projects I deal with have moved away from linux distributions in favor of installing into a virtualenv, largely due to dependency issues. Kivy looks to be a bit more complicated than some to install into a virtualenv because it needs some less common -dev packages.

I also see that Ground Control is not in pypi.org. Should it be?

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The application package that buildozer creates for OSX contains a virtual end as well as Kivy and all the dependencies. It is self-contained. I don’t see Linux support for buildozer, though.

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Looking at bulldozer, at one place it says it supports linux, but then it does not give it as a target.

But, this appears to be using a virtual machine (virtualBox), rather than a simple virtualenv. These are pretty different technologies, and I don’t think I would want to run something like GC under virtualbox, due to increased latency. This would be especially true with a serial interface, although the serial line might be running slowly enough that it would not really matter.

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Just remember we are doing Serial over USB, not real Serial. Both are Virtual Serial ports, so VirtualBox is probably doable. Someone build a VBOX and test it please. Or send me a Vbox image and I’ll test it.

Thank you