Reform-tools for all distros

My username I used there is the same as the one I used here. “joe-albanese”

I’m not an IRC user yet, but I just installed ii the other day with the intent of joining this one and Void’s IRC. I’ll see if I can get that going this evening

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I’ve been wondering lately if the usage of the openSUSE OBS might streamline the support for other deb/rpm/pkg-based distros… or other architectures perhaps? (non-arm64 fpga-layouts/CMs wink wink) It’d still be a bit of a long shot from truly universal packages but i believe if anything it’d provide an easily searchable resource :slightly_smiling_face:
Of course, i do have to disclose i’m a opensuse fan, so i am not exactly impartial, but i cant quite think of another resource that is both as featured and with no upstreams… Idea patches welcome?

A similar idea would be to package it for the nixpkgs repo, as nix can be installed as a package manager and used from most distros. It’s not very hard to go from .deb to nix package in most cases. I may look at this in the future once I get started on making NixOS work with my Pocket Reform. Others have already contributed a lot of effort here, so it may not be much work. We’ll see!

There is also the option of flatpak, perhaps a custom MNT-controlled repo rather than Flathub. (Flathub doesn’t really make sense for hardware-specific utils like this.) Almost all distros can use flatpaks. I’m not sure about the impact of sandboxing though.

Either of these would be a way to bring the tools to many distros without needing to worry about explicit support for niche distros.

Sure! If either @svp or @mountain set something up and you say that reform-tools could change this or that to make your life easier, please tell me and we can talk about adding these things to reform-tools.

With reform-tools release 1.66, the ./debian directory is now gone from it. New features do no longer have to merged into a branch that is not main (because there they would get picked up by the reform-debian-packages gitlab pipeline) but instead, new features can be pushed directly to main as with any other upstream project. Once a new release comes around, CHANGELOG.md gets updated and tagged. So development of reform-tools should now be much closer to how it would be for any normal project. The Debian integration is gone now.

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