Hi,
I was asked to come here and write a few words about the status of the new
Fedora Media Writer for Fedora, in a few major points for now. I haven't
read through the full meeting log yet so more stuff can follow down the
thread.
== Mac OS X Support
I was not able yet to build a working .app package with the LiveUSB
Creator for Mac. I have used probably every tool there is to freeze Python
scripts while using direct Qt installs, Macports and Homebrew. Usually I
hit issues either with missing dynamic library or broken QML imports. That
means there's not a problem with the code itself but with the way how to
distribute a usable package to the users.
If there is anyone looking to help me on that, I have uploaded just a
basic source code package to [1]. It's just a simple PyQt5/QML application
with just two source files but fundamentally the same as the FMW.
For now, I hope a Python3 port (yes, it's still Python2) will resolve
this. An other option is just to ditch the horrible Python mess and
rewrite the whole tool to a saner language that's actually portable.
== Design
I heard there are some raised voices regarding the design of the
application, that it's not the same as the design on gnome-design-team's
github. While there are some differences, I think they are mostly the same.
The main difference now is that now you can choose your achitecture with a
radiobox set in the main window below the name of your chosen Fedora
flavor instead of a small popup.
If you're concerned with the lack of headerbar usage, that's because the
app is written in Qt - there's no direct support for putting anything into
the header bar.
== Windows Support
Current plan is to distribute the application as a .exe installer created
using NSI. Either the installer or the application (or both?) will have to
be signed using a code signing certificate which we currently don't have
but can be obtained for I think 14 euros per year for open source
projects. As mentioned in the meeting yesterday, due to a communication
hiccup between me and releng, I expected I will be the one building and
signing the Windows package.
Now we're trying to resolve this with dgilmore. Currently it seems we'll
have to have a Windows machine running the builds or use upstream binary
packages in Wine because it's not possible to just compile upstream Python
using MinGW - it'd have to be heavily patched with some shady patches
lying on random peoples' blogs.
For future releases, it would be good to provide this as a single
self-extracting interpreter, though - in a similar way Windows installer
itself does it.
That's about it for now. I guess there will be questions and I'm here to
answer them.
Martin
[1] https://mbriza.fedorapeople.org/pythontest.tar.gz
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