Musescore from PPA on ubuntu 14.04

• May 9, 2015 - 14:13

Hi!

I've been strugling with some issues with other QT based programs that occured to be originated in MuseScore Ubuntu PPA.

It would be great if you'd taken into consideration fixing these issues in future so other users won't break their systems trying to solve QT dependencies.

QT dependencies problem couresty of Xylosper, Bomi player developer - one of the programs that was impossible to use due to issues in MuseScore PPA:


If you want to keep using MuseScore, you'd better tell them not to break versioning rule for PPA and not to override system critical library partially.
They should've provided full update for Qt 5.3 if they wanted to override Qt but they only updated partial pacakges they needed, which resulted in breaking of dependencies.
Futhermore, the non-standard versioning for PPA package made it harder to find the problem.

https://github.com/xylosper/bomi/issues/175#issuecomment-100479281

Thanks in advance!

Comments

• May 9, 2015 - 19:41

OK, I self-compile Nightlies and for a while I ran Qt 5.x and 4.x side-by-side and hacked the latest gcc libraries in to allow installation each of the latest MuseScore builds but eventually I gave up installing the latest Qt and gcc libraries etc. and just upgraded to ubuntu 15.04.

I can understand that the average unbuntu user may have come to expect that since 14.04 has long-term support that most of the programs should still work on it when they are updated but MuseScore does seem to always use the very latest libraries - is this strictly necessary? Would Windows 7 users expect to have to upgrade to Windows 10?

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• Dec 17, 2015 - 11:35

I installed musescore 2.0.2 from the musescore PPA as explained.

But as the qt libraries version 5.3.0 is not one of the stable versions
available on the Ubuntu deposit
(whatever the Ubuntu versions,
and in particular NOT on the 14.04 LTS version deposit),

I encountered very difficult problems with the installation of other programs
that became impossible due to the lib installation previously performed by musescore

It was very difficult to recover (impossible for me at least) and finally, I had to desinstall musescore 2.0.2 (to remove all the 5.3.0 libraries), repair my libraries,
and then install the old musescore version 1.3.0, as available on Ubuntu deposit!

Musescore should use the libraries version as available on the Ubuntu deposit,
otherwise it become not compatible with other installations.
Musescore should preferably be compatible with the standard LTS version. Then it has a chance to sit on a useable DAW.

Thanks

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• Dec 23, 2015 - 22:36

I too have run into problems after installing the newest version of musescore through their ppa. Shame that I will have to uninstall/downgrade simply because they don't use the qt version that is available in the default repositories.

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• Dec 24, 2015 - 09:31

Thanks for raising this issue. I've been maintaining the PPA since September (a while after this thread was started, hence not seeing it until now).

TLDR:

  1. I'll look into the possibility of including all Qt packages in the PPA.
  2. I'm also looking at a long-term solution to Linux packaging woes.
  3. In the meantime, it is free to upgrade Ubuntu to 15.10 or to upgrade Qt manually.

It may interest you to know that I am looking into creating a portable build of MuseScore for Linux (based on this formula) that should solve dependency related issues.

In the meantime, perhaps I can explain the reasoning behind the decisions taken with the current releases of MuseScore for Ubuntu and respond to the points raised:

Why don't we stick to LTS libraries?
Ubuntu has a particularly slow release cycle in terms of LTS releases, but the 6 month regular Ubuntu releases usually have a recent enough Qt to run MuseScore available in the default repository. It is impractical to make users on Mac, Windows and other Linux distros wait for 2 years for fixes/features just so that Ubuntu users can get the next LTS release, let alone 5 years for the previous LTS to expire, especially when it is free to upgrade Ubuntu to a non-LTS release and Qt itself is a free download.

What about Windows and Mac?
Packaging for these systems is completely different as dependencies can simply be included in the package. (This is possible on Linux too, but is forbidden by most distributions.) Thus Windows and Mac users never have to upgrade their system (as long as their system version is supported by Qt itself). In the past, if Windows or Mac users ever did have to upgrade they would have to pay to do so whereas Linux is free. (Now that Windows and Mac are both free to upgrade this is no longer an issue.)

As it happens, the portable solution I am looking into would involve building a package that would include Qt built in, just like the Windows and Mac packages. However, because of this the package will not be available via the Ubuntu Software Centre or the PPA so you would have to download it from the MuseScore website like Windows and Mac users do.

Why are the Qt packages in the PPA incomplete?
Updating shared libraries risks compatibility issues with other software. I imagine it was for this reason that the previous maintainer decided to only included the bare minimum packages needed to run MuseScore rather than all of the Qt packages. However, if it turns out that a partial Qt upgrade is more likely to cause problems then I can have a look at adding the other Qt packages too. The Qt packages in the MuseScore PPA are simply the Qt packages from the latest Ubuntu recompiled on the older Ubuntu, so in a way they are the same as the packages from the official repository.

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• Dec 24, 2015 - 10:29

Thanks for taking the time to write everything out.

Being a LTS-user for the first time, I must admit that I am often bothered by the old package versions. I've been considering to upgrade for the longest time now, but laziness has so far prevented me from doing so.

The portable version seems like a great idea.

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