[GNC] Ubuntu PPAs (Launchpad)

[Brad Morrison]

Hi Bruce, John, & others, 

Interesting topic! 

The fewer versions of GNUCash there are, the less work it is for
developers to reproduce issues AKA limiting possibilities reduces the
work involved in trying to reproduce & understand issues. 

Repology seems to list 256 various Linux distro versions that use many
different versions of GNUCash in their repositories -
https://repology.org/project/gnucash/versions 

I can think of a few ways to approach this: 

1. Are there specific reasons why some developers/users would still be
using Ubuntu 22.04? It looks like the current version of Ubuntu is 25.04
- https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu 

If there was a financial cost to upgrading the operating system, whether
from having to purchase the current version of Windows or MacOS or
having to purchase new(er) hardware, that's totally valid.  

For operating systems like Ubuntu & other free Linux distros
(https://distrowatch.com/), if someone's existing hardware supports the
current version, why not spend the few hours upgrading the OS? 

2. It looks like it is possible to run Flatpaks on Ubuntu & here are the
setup instructions - https://flatpak.org/setup/Ubuntu &
https://flathub.org/setup/Ubuntu 

3. Here is the Flathub page for the GNUCash flatpak -
https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnucash.GnuCash 

Instead of reducing the workload for GNUCash developers, increasing the
options for supporting the project include: 

Financial contributions - https://www.gnucash.org/donate.phtml  

Nonfinancial contributions -
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Contributing_to_GnuCash (more geared
towards users) & https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/WishList (more for
developers) 

---
Thanks, 

Brad - https://www.facebook.com/brad.morrison.12327/ &
https://nextdoor.com/profile/01mP46jj8KCzj3sP4 &
https://norcal.social/@BradMorrison 

On 2025-05-20 14:30, Bruce Schuck wrote:

> On 5/20/25 1:59 PM, John Ralls wrote:
> 
> An alternative for those using older Ubuntu releases

> 5.11 is as up to date as it gets, that's the current release.

I noted "older Ubuntu releases" for those such as me on Ubuntu 22.04
LTS. I usually upgrade every other LTS, so I skipped 24.04 and will
update my OS sometime after 26.04LTS is released next April.

If I want to run 5.11 on my system I would need to either use a flatpack
or compile 5.11 myself. Either is relatively simple for me, as I have
experimented on virtual systems. But for Ubuntu 22.04, the most recent
GC release via standard Ubuntu/Canonical repo is 4.8.

I started thinking about PPAs when a couple reported YahooJSON issues
that were recently fixed. Both were using older Ubuntu releases (I think
20.04 and 22.04) and a 5.x GC flatpack. Not sure why neither of them
didn't just get the latest flatpack at first.

Yes, I know Ubuntu uses Debian packages. I build binary packages at work
for a couple in-house applications that we deploy using Ansible or
SaltStack. But PPAs don't allow one to directly upload binary packages.

> I won't object if someone is willing to step up and be the
> "official" PPA-maker *provided* that that someone *commits* to doing
> it reliably for every release until they find somebody to replace
> them.

I assuumed that at least part of the reason for not using PPA was
workload. And from my playing around, building a flatpack (not
installing) is easier than preparing and building a PPA source package.
But then I've just started playing with creating my own.

Thanks for the info.

Bruce S.
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