Manuskript 0.12.0 as snap

Because some random events and a missing maintainer I became the actual maintainer of Manuskript, an open-source tool for writers (with over 1k stars on Github 😅). I didn’t really have any experience in maintaining packages until then with the exceptions of smaller packages in the AUR. However it went reasonable I would say and I published my first release of Manuskript (0.12.0).

Sure, the release had some minor issues:

  • It crashed/didn’t start on Windows. 😓
  • It performed worse though of the spell- and grammar-checking with LanguageTool, I added. 😐
  • I had to publish a fixed version for Windows (it still crashed on Windows 7 and 8, Windows XP wasn’t even supported anymore 😕)
  • I didn’t had any access to snapcraft.io, so the snap package could not be updated (it also contained some errors which made the build impossible as well). 😟

But slowly we got there. I’ve implemented a very useful script to automatically build the Windows version via Wine on my Arch Linux btw and debugged together with different people from the community how to patch it until it works on most Windows systems. The problem was actually the mixture of PyInstaller and Qt5 which generated unnecessary libraries, we needed to delete. For example QtBluetooth ended up in the zipped folder even though Manuskript is for local file editing - it doesn’t even require networking. 😅

During the time thinking about how to fix the issue with the snap package (I actually contacted the previous maintainer of the snap), I also looked into flatpaks. Short version is: We have a flatpak now which is on Flathub! 😁

But it still requires a lot of work to get close to the version you can get from the Arch repositories. It misses the PDF export preview because Qt5 is a pain to work with, creating a flatpak. Especially if you want to use PyQt5 and need its web-components. My recommendation is: Copy your flatpak from a native KDE applications flatpak or avoid it at all cost!

However since a few days I got access to the package on snapcraft.io and I could finally publish the newest release over there. I’m still making some adjustments to its configuration because similar to flatpak it’s not easy to work with. From my experience it would be a lot easier if those configuration were just bash scripts like the PKGBUILDs on Arch. I really hope it becomes easier over time.

It still amazes me a little that I could figure out how to get all those issues (mostly) solved. The next release 0.13.0 will probably come out next month and I don’t plan on needing day-one-patches. 😀

Fingers crossed,
Jacki

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