Thank you for the response.

I really wasn't expecting a fix, just clarification as I never worked with flatpak before. Makes sense that one would not want to be able to modify any of the related tools and supported applications (like perl and the F::Q modules for GnuCash). Making changes would violate the concept of why it's a flatpak.

At first my mindset is too used to the chroot, Solaris Zones, VMs, LXC/LXD way of thinking.

Thanks again also to John R for his responses.

Official F::Q v1.53 should be pushed to CPAN this Saturday, 10/08/2022.

- Bruce S.

On 10/5/22 1:08 PM, Geert Janssens wrote:
Op maandag 3 oktober 2022 00:38:23 CEST schreef Bruce Schuck:

 > Hello all,

 >

 > Noticing that the most recent Flatpak version of GnuCash (4.12+ (Flathub

 > 4.12)) has v1.49 of Finance::Quote, I wanted to update to the recent

 > release candidate I pushed to CPAN. I believe there are issues running

 > gnc-fq-update or cpan within the flatpak container because some of the

 > modules required by F::Q v1.52 and later require the gcc compiler to

 > make and install. As far as I can see, gcc is not in the flatpak GnuCash

 > distribution.

 >

 > While copying the ./lib/Finance tree from GitHub or a downloaded tarball

 > may seem to work, some of the lesser used methods for data retrieval may

 > not work.

 >

 > - Bruce S.


Flatpak follows a completely different distribution model than typical distributions do. It starts from the concept of an immutable base system. You are not supposed to manipulate this directly. So running gnc-fq-update is unfortunately not supposed to work within flatpak and the whole concept is designed to make that difficult to do.


The runtime that's normally used to run flatpak applications doesn't have any developer tools. You can switch to using sdk packages instead as Frank linked to, but it remains limited.


Having said that, there are several options to get newer versions of Finance::Quote in the hands of gnucash flatpak users. Though all involve rebuilding the gnucash flatpak in some way.


1. We have our own flatpak repository in which we publish nightly builds. The source for these nightly builds is the Gnucash/gnucash-on-flatpak repo on github. The build system is fairly automated (more on that later).


2. You can also use the same repo to set up your own build environment for gnucash flatpaks, if your main goal is to test for yourself or before you submit a PR to gnucash-on-flatpak. I don't know how easy or hard this is perceived by outsiders (I created that repo and the scripts in there, so to me it's obviously not too hard).


3. The flatpaks as distributed on flathub are also under the gnucash project's control. We typically first test our changes in gnucash-on-flatpak and if proven ok, we copy the same patches to flathub. Flathub offers both a stable and a beta branch. On stable we should only push stable software, so releaseĀ  candidates for Finance::Quote don't belong there. However we could experiment on the beta branch if that helps.


The idea is the same in all cases: flatpak builds follow a recipe as describe in a manifest file. Our manifest file is split up in smaller parts for readability but in general this contains a list of source packages, where to find them and how to build them. The sources for Finance::Quote are in

https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-on-flatpak/blob/master/modules/finance-quote-sources.json
 
<https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-on-flatpak/blob/master/modules/finance-quote-sources.json>

The way to update is to change version numbers of tar balls and the sha256 sums for these tarballs. Pushing these changes to the correct upstream repos will trigger new builds of the respective flatpaks.



Regards,


Geert


Attachment: OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel

Reply via email to