Distribution packages outdated / How to coordinate new releases?

[dannyedel]

Hello @kd35a,
Hello @jeeger,

first of all thanks again for helping me with the packaging. I've programmed a bit more since you included dspdfviewer in gentoo and arch and it has a few new features.

I've also done a bit of restructuring and moved (I used git commit --author to commit your lines, I hope thats ok) system-specific installation instructions into the gh-pages branch (which results in a rendered website) to reduce clutter in the sourcecode. While moving, I noticed that the distribution-specific installation instructions may be outdated (at least the gentoo link points to 404). If you could help by checking and - if necessary - updating the instructions, that would be awesome.

However, it's a problem is that we never agreed on a way on how to coordinate new releases. This also applies to @projekter, who succeeded at building windows (!) binaries of dspdfviewer.

I believe the new features added (especially the hyperlinks, and the file-chooser-window when started without a command-line-parameter) justify creating a v1.13 within the next few days. I'd appreciate your help in establishing some kind of "a new release is there" protocol, so this stable release gets propagated to all distributions the software already has a package in.

Please post your ideas here, I hope we can figure something out. (Remember, this is my first-ever open source project, so its all new land for me too and I'm glad to be pointed out to mistakes.)

[jeeger]

Hey! Thanks for pinging me on this, I'll look into making a working package for Gentoo.

W.r.t. releases: dspdfviewer still hasn't been included in the official Gentoo tree (see this bug), and I doubt this will happen anytime soon.

I could make an overlay though, which is a sort of unofficial extension of the package database, which needs to be manually enabled by users. This would allow users to find and install dspdfviewer relatively easily. I'll see how much effort it will be to make an overlay.

Update: I just installed the "bleeding-edge" package of dspdfviewer, and it still works. Unless dspdfviewer gets new dependencies, or the internal structure changes appreciably, a simple rename of the package should update the dspdfviewer version.

[jeeger]

New ebuilds are in #49.

[kd35a]

Hi!

I've been so far checking in every couple of weeks to see if there have come any new release-tags. But a better solution would be to have a mailing list where new releases would be announced. Seems like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are popular choices that are free to set up. And both allows for moderation of who is allowed to send to the list (Google, Yahoo), so that only you can announce new releases.

[dannyedel]

@kd35a, the idea of a broadcast email seems right to me. However, I think this should be possible using the github platform alone, but I can't find it (I can only find the "watch complete repository" function).

I've contacted github support and asked for help, maybe this will solve our problem.

[dannyedel]

First: I don't have a google or yahoo email and I'd rather keep using my independent mailserver, so I'd like to avoid creating one there (If I have to use their account to send announcements, people will start sending mails to that account and wonder why nobody answers).

As far as I can tell the administrator/creator of a list must have an account, I cannot tell if it works like a normal mailing list (send e-mails to group-name[-request]@server.tld) from there on out, supporting "any" mailaddress. If it does work that way, I'll happily send announcement mails with my normal email account to it, but I don't want to set up one myself.

---- snip ----

I also got an answer from github support:

There is an atom feed at https://github.com/dannyedel/dspdfviewer/releases.atom that will update automatically when a new release is there.

I tried icedove (debian's thunderbird derivate), it can render these just like a mailbox (marking new releases as "unread" until I click on them). Also I've looked at the xml source, and it contains an <updated> tag at the toplevel that says <updated>2015-07-23T15:46:42Z</updated> right now, so that might even be suitable for scripted checking.

--- snip ---

In addition, I could create a ticket on each new release using the @usernames of you all, so you should™ get an email from github aswell.

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Could one of these methods work?

[dannyedel]

@jeeger, that "overlay" seems like a really cool thing.

From a quick look at http://overlays.gentoo.org/ a lot of people use it to host ebuilds on github and easily load them into their gentoo installations. So if I get that right, all you'd have to do is spawn a fresh github repository with your ebuilds in the correctly-named folders, add it to that list over there, and the "install ebuild into a local overlay" installation instruction could get replaced with one layman call.

[jeeger]

Yep, I'll see what I can do.

Am 30. Juli 2015 14:28:44 MESZ, schrieb Danny Edel notifications@github.com:

@jeeger, that "overlay" seems like a really cool thing.

From a quick look at http://overlays.gentoo.org/ a lot of people use it
to host ebuilds on github and easily load them into their gentoo
installations. So if I get that right, all you'd have to do is spawn a
fresh github repository with your ebuilds in the correctly-named
folders, add it to that list over there, and the "install ebuild into a
local overlay" installation instruction could get replaced with one
layman call.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#47 (comment)

Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Mobiltelefon gesendet.

[dannyedel]

I've called the current version v1.13, and that atom feed picked it up.

I'm currently starting the compilations for all debian derivates and ubuntus that I have in stock, so you can test and maybe include it into your distributions aswell.

[kd35a]

Nice with the feed! Worked great in Thunderbird for me 😄

Maybe that's a good solution until someone™ finds the project big enough to start hosting a mail list. Wanting to skip Google, a.k.a. Skynet, is a good thing that I fully support (I'm also hosting my own mail server). But it seems like Google allows you to create an account with your current email-address, without having to use gmail if that's an option you feel is reasonable.

I will probably stop responding soon, until next week, as I'm travelling tonight to start hiking in the mountains where there's no cell coverage.

The last release seems to be q few years behind "master".

Would a new release be possible in 2023?