Re: [Ring] Ring installation packages for Debian 8

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi,

----- Original Message -----
> From: "bill-auger" <bill-auger@peers.community>
> To: address@hidden
> Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 1:00:02 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ring] Ring installation packages for Debian 8

> i should add that ring barely supports debian 9 or ubuntu today - the
> ring package in debian main is from 2016 which i dont think will even
> work anymore - 

I've tried it myself and it still connected to the DHT and could call/exchange 
messages, but it *is* old and contains many bugs that have since been fixed. 
That the Ring package found natively on the mainstream GNU/Linux distros is 
outdated is something we'd like to address.

> the ubuntu 'universe' package is also over a year old
> (20170803) so other than compiling from source, users must be subscribed
> to the ring nightly repos to have a current version

Agreed that in the meantime the recommended way to get the best experience is 
to use one of the nightly repos found on our website: 
https://ring.cx/en/download/gnu-linux. Also note that only Ubuntu is currently 
supported for 32 bits architecture.

> if all dependencies are still satisfiable in debian 8 and it can indeed
> be compiled from source, then it could be packaged for debian 8 and
> there is little reason not to do so because debian 8 is LTS and
> supported until April 2020

I haven't looked into the details, but since there was a decision taken to drop 
support for it, I would think that there were difficulties in doing so!

> when i read this email last week i was reminded that i have been
> intending for some time to package ring on OBS to make it more widely
> available but the only deb-src package i could find was the obsolete one
> in debian from 2016 - there are some packaging scripts in the current
> git source but those have not been updated since 2016 and i had numerous
> problems trying to get them to actually build a package even for debian 9

The scripts found in our git repository are the ones used to generate the 
packages available on our Ring nightly repos; they shouldn't be outdated. 

> for those who are not familiar with OBS, it is a build server that
> automates the building and distribution of packages for many disparate
> distros, including many popular distros that no one is packaging ring
> for, such as:
> 
> * Fedora 27
> * Debian 7 LTS (supported until May 2018)
> * Debian 8 LTS (supported until April 2020)
> * Ubuntu 14 LTS (supported until April 2019)
> * various RPM distros such as Magia, Centos, Redhat

Fedora 27 is another place we'd like Ring to be available natively. I'm not 
familiar with OBS, but 
if it allows Ring to be available on more platforms, I'd like to know more!

> there is currently a repo on OBS that serves ring packages for opensuse
> - i presented this idea to the maintainer about a year ago and offered
> my help because he/she was having trouble at first but he/she did not
> accept my help and is apparently only interested in packaging for
> opensuse for some unknown reason - that instance can be easily cloned
> and because most RPM distros use very similar packaging, the other RPM
> distros mentioned above would probably be not much work to build for
> using the opensuse repo as a base - but without the current deb-src i
> would need to start debian/ubuntu packaging from scratch so i put the
> project back on the shelf for now until either the official debian
> package is upgraded or the current deb-src package is published on the
> ring repo

I'm not sure what generating the deb-src involves, but my got tells me that 
probably not much is missing. I'll try to see if I can have it generated.

Happy hacking!

Maxim