When I went to try to install the requested library, I found out that this is not included in Trixie’s repository’s. I didn’t check into it yet but I assume that I can still install it if I download it manually and sort out all the dependencies. This is a pain and goes against the App-Image philosophy that the app-Image is suppose to include all dependencies that are needed to run the program.
This is an old problem that I had over 4 years ago on Debian 11 and it still hasn’t been fixed.
@lubos Is this something that could get fixed in the next several weeks?
I still think that a .deb install file should be released. At least for Debian and Ubuntu. There may be a little more work up front, but Debian has a 2 year release cycle so once you get it working it should be good for 2 years. You would have to rebuild the .deb file for each new release of the Manager, but unless you did a major overhaul of the program, the small updated features of the program would not call for different dependencies.
Fedora does have a 6 month release cycle and is definitely more prone to breakage, but would still probably not be a problem.
Though your request is indeed very reasonable from an end user standpoint, maintaining all the stable dependencies for all Linux distros isn’t such a trivial task.
For example, what if another package required a different version of this library in order to run which wasn’t compatible with Manager? That would be a real pickle for a developer trying to maintain compatiblity with every Linux distro.
I could argue–and I could be wrong–that it’s much easier for the user to take an extra hour once a couple of years to install the dependencies than for the developer to assume the continuous burden of having to deal with version incompatibilities accross all Linux distros.
The main problem here, is that the libraries in question are now out of date and there are newer versions of them available. So it only makes sense to update to the newer version of the required library.
In my opinion, I disagree with this. If you are going to develop and publish a piece of software such as Manager, it is the developers responsibility to make sure that his software can be installed with minimal effort. No end user wants to spend 1-2 hours trying to find the dependencies that are needed and possibly breaking some other software in the process.
We have examples on this forum where Linux users had to roll back some libraries, including gtk4.0 down to gtk3.0only on some distros. Other distros were fine.
Unfortunately, some distros are not fully compatible with the latest version. This creates a problem as to which version to include, especially since including the latest along with Manager could break other things on users devices.
That’s why I think some tasks are better left to be handled by the user.
That was me, when I was on Fedora. and it was not nice because every time I updated my system, it removed the rolled back library’s and installed the new one. Now I know there is a way to pin the old versions, but this is not something your average Joe is going to know how to do nor want to do. And it could break other programs that are expected to run on your currently installed OS.
If it such that I could just install the missing package from the distros repository, that would be fine. But If I have to downgrade my systems files to make a program work or pull in dependencies from a different distro, thats when I think the developer needs to step in and see if the program can be updated to accommodate newer OS.
To be honest on my first post were I mention that that the problem was 4 years old, that is not entirely true because I remember I was able to use the program after I installed the missing libraries and I am currently using it on Debian 12. I don’t remember if I had to manually install that library or not. And since the missing library was in the repository it was a single command to install. Not so with Debian 13.
