KDE: Snaps move, KDE neon unstable broken OMG! Fixed, and Debian updates

Witch Wells Az
Kitties keeping warm!

It’s that time of year already! We have hit our first freeze of the year. While the kitties keep warm by the wood burning stove, I have been busy with many updates and fixes in a variety of projects.

KDE neon:

It’s true, Neon unstable has been very unstable. Due to a few factors including a builder being out of space, timed with a new Qt release. There is a cost with living in unstable land with bleeding edge releases. It takes time and finesse to get everything happy, especially with major transitions such as Qt. The drive issue was just bad timing. We worked night and day ( quite literally with people spanning from the US, Europe and Australia ) to get everything happy again. I know it’s frustrating when things are broken, but please keep in mind, most of us are volunteers. I am happy to report, it is once again stable. If you continue to experience issues please report them on https://bugs.kde.org there have been a few cases where there were rogue apt sources lists creating issues. We also have the User edition which is much more stable!

KDE Snaps:

The big move to snapcraft files per repo continues. With that comes a new version 23.08.2. This big win this week was Audiotube! I have finally got this snap working. With a combination of snappy-debug and snap run –gdb audiotube I was able to find all the hidden dependencies such as yt-dlp needed to be built with ffmpeg support and it needed a newer ytmusicapi as the version it called for was broken with gettext translations. I also had to fix the dbus name as it was not the standard org.kde.app. The final fix was it required the alsa plug and layouts adjusted to point to the snap alsa libraries ( which fixed the very important sound feature ). Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Unfortunately, it still requires –devmode to run, as it has one last network issue even with all the network plugs. I have to set it aside for now, as I have many more snaps to migrate. However, if you want to enjoy youtube music with this super awesome app you can, just append –devmode when installing. Enjoy!

The following apps have now migrated to their respective KDE repos and have the snap recipes in launchpad for automated builds:

  • Blinken
  • Bovo
  • Calindori
  • Dragon
  • Dolphin ( still needs work )
  • Digikam ( still needs work )
  • Elisa ( Working on new qml issue )
  • Falkon
  • Filelight
  • GCompris
  • Granatier
  • Ghostwriter
  • Gwenview ( working on missing dependency )
  • Haruna ( still needs work )
  • isoimagewriter ( working on gpg support )
  • Itinerary
  • Juk
  • K3b ( still needs work )

A new content pack with the latest Frameworks 5.110 and Qt 5.15.11 is complete and the neon extension update will follow after the required global autoconnect is approved from the store.

Debian:

I have caught up on my dashboard with new releases, fixed test failures, and FTBFS on the more obscure arches. The following debian packages have been uploaded to unstable:

description
umbrello
squashfuse
golang-github-muesli-mango
golang-github-muesli-roff
speechpy-fast
lingua-franca

If you have made it this far, thank you! As you can see I am quite busy and there is still much to do. If you can possibly spare a donation so I can continue my efforts in KDE neon / KDE Snaps / and Debian, it would be so appreciated. I enjoy doing this work and I hope it benefits someone out there. Have a lovely day and thanks for stopping by.

Donate

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54