Provide a PPA for easy installation

[khurshid-alam]

It would be nice if we can have a PPA for easy installation on Ubuntu.

pypocr already in Ubuntu's repo. We only need to compile pyinsane in the same PPA.

[jflesch]

It would actually be more interesting to get Paperwork packaged in Debian. This is how PyOCR ended up in Ubuntu.
(see #466 )

[khurshid-alam]

Debian packaging would be nice, but for debian all the dependencies need to be packaged first which could take time.

Meanwhile we can all have PPA. PPA can be made to build automatically if it detects any changes (and I can help with you that).

But from issue what I can see is that nobody made an attempt to create a package for pyinsane. If it provides a setup.py, it should be easy enough to do so.

[mjourdan]

Well, something else we should look at: https://flathub.org/

It's still at its early stages of development but could host our flatpak (see #559) for all distributions.

[jflesch]

I personally believe Flatpak is the way to go. It's the recommended Gnome way. and could help for development as well.

[khurshid-alam]

Flatpak has few major weakness:

1. Nobody wants to install entire platform run-time for a simple app (near 2.5 GB). And then there is memory leak in runtime.

2. Doesn't really works with themes other than Adwaita itself. Do we really want to use app completely out of place with system theme?

3. No root access. No DND. And very restricted access to the rest of the system.

IMHO, Flatpak has a long long way to go before it can become mainstream. Snap actually does better in this regard.

[jflesch]

If someone want to make a snap they can.

But if I spend time on packaging myself, I will go with Flatpak because I hope someday to make Paperworkl part of Gnome extra-apps. Therefore I'll try to maximize integration with Gnome tools (--> flatpak, gnome-builder, etc).