vnote-mpr

This is where I keep a few words on packaging the source package vnote from the AUR for the MPR.

About

I spent about one day on a weekend to see if I can basically copy an entire PKGBUILD from the AUR and paste it into $ makedeb, with minor edits for Debian-related aspects.

Basically, this process worked with a lot of trial and error to determine what dependencies were needed in Debian, as opposed to the more simple and direct package naming conventions in Arch Linux.

AUR to MPR changes

The only changes I noticed were:

• different naming conventions from Debian in depencencies
  • qtbase5-dev needed to be added
  • packages with the suffix *-dev are important for "development" packages -- i.e., building Qt applications from source, which is what we are doing here in this AUR/MPR package
  • qt-make is most likely a dependency for the make process, but not at runtime
• adding git submodule update --remote at the end of each git submodule init "stanza"
  • this prevents a git commit mismatch -- I am not sure if this behavior is due to Debian "modifying" Git from upstream

Credit

Credit goes to:

• Fabio 'Lolix' Loli (@FabioLolix) as the current AUR maintainer
• erk <v at erk dot io> as an AUR contributor

Consideration goes to:

• Pop!_OS, for fighting the good fight against Canonical's monotonically regressive changes to Ubuntu (except for Ubuntu turning Chromium into a Snap package -- this is an upstream change from Ubuntu that currently only Linux Mint has been able to repackage Chromium as a "normal" .deb)
• The makedeb project, for giving a pragmatic path for npm, Node.js, and/or Electron application binaries to be used on Debian- or Ubuntu-based Linux distros when maintainers do not have any plans to make a custom APT repository
  • Some examples from the MPR include:
    • electronmail-bin
    • freetube-bin
    • tutanota-desktop-bin
  • A counter example would be Signal Desktop

License

The PKGBUILD is licensed under the GPLv3 license.

(This is not to be confused with VNote being licensed under the LGPLv3 license.)

Aside

I do not know if declaring a FOSS license for a PKGBUILD actually matters -- however, if this is not correct convention, then I will change the license or remove it in the future.