HomeBank

Change Deployment Package Format

Asked by Jesse Geiger

It is my understanding that the PPA repository format is Canonical/Ubuntu specific for app release, and does not work on other "Debian derivated" OS. It is for Ubuntu only. Looking at LMDE (the newer Linux Mint Debian Edition) I see that the FlatPak version is 5.5.5, and the base app repo version is only at 5.5.2-1.

Your latest version of 5.5.6 was released on June 28, but I am unable to obtain it. While I understand you likely have no control over certain aspects of deployment availability, what would you recommend as the best way to make the latest version of your app available to those that want it? While FlatPak still seems to be behind, I am not sure if someone made that available on your behalf. Can it be updated?

What about the AppImage format, which also has all dependencies contained, and is Linux platform independent? Looking to stay within your user base, but a little difficult if I can't obtain future versions of your app should I decide to move away from Ubuntu / Mint.

Compiling on my own is not the most ideal solution for those that don't do such things, even with instructions.

Looking forward to other ideas.

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HomeBank Edit question
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Jesse Geiger
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This question was originally filed as bug #1988111.

Revision history for this message
Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen) said (last edit ): 		#1

this is more a question, and my answer will be more usefull by staying here than in a closed bug.

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Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen) said (last edit ): 		#2

Your initial assumption is in fact wrong: you can normally use ppa on any debian derivative and debian itself, as ppa provide... a .deb (native debian package), there is plenty of article if you search 'how to use ppa on xxx' on the web, that would help. HomeBank dependency are just other open source lib: libofx and libsoup, which are not specific to ubuntu.

FlatPack, AppImage, etc and worst of all : snap, are not full installation, they install and run beside the system, or sometimes run on a kind of sandbox. And the side effect of this crappy thing is: slowness and bad performance, and few other pain point.

Usually, package maintainer update 3rd based on source code. This is something I cannot, nor have time to control. And like me they do this on their spare time, so it may not be up to date to the latest (but most of the time you don't need the latest minor version), I suppose they are more hury for the major version.

So far the community failed to create a universal package system, so there is no good solution out there, and will not be in a near future, as each major linux distro which are Debian, Arch and Fedora have its own, that consider as the best, or more legitimate. Good news is that all minor distro derive from those 3, and debian based is the most spread. And hopefully, most linux users can compile anything from the source code if no option or package available and if they can wait for.

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Jesse Geiger (jesgeiger) said : 		#3

Thank you for the detailed reply. I did search a bit on using PPAs in LMDE, but will continue to search more communities, as I get a "PPAs not allowed" message.

I fully understand that package availability is out of your control, and am generally confused at the multiple formats available to install the same app, but am trying to figure it out, coming from the Windows world.

After this comment I shall mark this post as answered. Thank you again.

Revision history for this message
Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen) said (last edit ): 		#4

the best is always to stay into the major distribution you uses, so for you debian package.

I recently switch to Linux Mint myself, but not LMDE (I was using Ubuntu for years).
Fedora and Arch are up to date, but debian not.
You can probably contact the debian package maintainer (Fransceco Namuri) to ask for an update.
https://packages.debian.org/fr/sid/gnome/homebank