Create RPM packages on GitHub

[bkmgit]

Until licensing for Remix icons Remix-Design/RemixIcon#430 is fully resolved, rpm packages for novelWriter which contain Remix icons cannot be built on Fedora infrastructure. Use a Fedora container on GitHub to generate RPM packages for at least x86_64 possibly arm.

[vkbo]

Since no one has responded to that issue in 3 years, I doubt there will be a response. Meanwhile, the email correspondence mentioned in the issue thread on GitLab seems to indicate this restriction does not apply when bundled in a larger app, so I still don't understand what the issue is.

In any case, I'm not sure if internal distro procedures should affect the upstream project. You can easily filter out the two files, can't you?

[bkmgit]

There does not seem to be a license similar to the Open Font License for icons, which seems to be the intent of the icon creators, but until clear non-contradictory licensing information is put in the icon repository, it is mostly speculation. There is a compliance risk for NovelWriter contributors and users.

The files are part of a theme, so would need to use other icons or remove the theme.

If the RPMs are created in the upstream repo, then end users can decide if the icon licensing is problematic for them or not.
Probably Debian would have the same problem, but if most users are happy to use a PPA rather than main Debian repositories, it maybe easier to distribute RPMs the same way.

[vkbo]

There does not seem to be a license similar to the Open Font License for icons, which seems to be the intent of the icon creators, but until clear non-contradictory licensing information is put in the icon repository, it is mostly speculation.

Ok, fine. So the email quoted in the GitLab issue thread is from where? If it is from them, then there is no speculation. It clearly states that it does not apply to bundled icons.

There is a compliance risk for NovelWriter contributors and users.

The clause is irrelevant for end users, so I see no issue for the main repository nor any of the packages released by it. I can put a note in the main README and credits file.

The files are part of a theme, so would need to use other icons or remove the theme.

The colour themes and icon themes are separate. Removing the two Remix files will have no consequences other than they will not be selectable in Preferences, which is a non-issue since there are plenty more options. The default icon theme is one of the Material themes from Google.

If the RPMs are created in the upstream repo, then end users can decide if the icon licensing is problematic for them or not. Probably Debian would have the same problem, but if most users are happy to use a PPA rather than main Debian repositories, it maybe easier to distribute RPMs the same way.

To my knowledge, there are no repo packages for Debian. I don't know about other distros. People usually don't tell me about these things. So I think it's a good idea to add a note somewhere about the icon license inconsistency.

In either case, the solution here is clearly to just not include the two Remix files in packages for distros that cannot have non-free content.

[vkbo]

By the way, is it also a problem for forks that the icons are in the repository itself?

The icon themes are built from their original icon source repos, and the icon theme files don't actually have to be kept in the repository. They can easily be built selectively during the packaging process. The only reason I pre-build them is that the icon repos themselves are pretty large and it takes some time to clone them during the process of generating the icon themes.

If the icons instead are built at packaging time, you can build the two themes that are fine license wise and leave out Remix entirely.

[bkmgit]

Being able to pull in icons and selectively build them would be great. They could also be in another repository/other repositories under vkbo.

[vkbo]

At least one icon theme must be bundled with novelWriter of course, otherwise each icon slot will show up as a big red X.

The big bottleneck when building the icon themes is the Google repo for Material Design icons. It contains millions of files. However, I can solve that by keeping the Material Symbols set as the default icon theme in novelWriter, and make Font Awesome and Remix Icons extra themes that can be built and bundled by running the icons build commands:

./pkgutils.py icons remix
./pkgutils.py icons font_awesome

[vkbo]

Ok, so I've updated the icons build to:

usage: pkgutils.py [command] [--flags] icons [-h] [--work-dir WORK_DIR] style

positional arguments:
  style                What icon style to build: all, default, optional, free, non_free, material, font_awesome, remix

options:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  --work-dir WORK_DIR  Working directory.

Where:

• all builds all themes
• default builds Material Design
• optional builds Font Awesome and Remix (used for repo releases)
• free builds Font Awesome (to be used for Fedora)
• non_free builds Remix (for completeness)

That should cover all possibilities and make room for adding more themes without having to update packaging scripts.

[vkbo]

The Remix and Font Awesome themes files have now been removed from the repo in the release branch. I'll do a 2.7.4 right away since there are also new translation files available. If you add

./pkgutils.py icons free

to the build on Fedora for 2.7.4, you should be good to go.

I will also merge the 2.7.4 changes into main after the release, so the icon themes will be stripped there too.

[vkbo]

Done. Only the Material Symbols themes remain in both the release and main branch. The others have been removed.

You should be able to release 2.7.4 on Fedora without the Remix Icons theme included. To include the Font Awesome theme, add the command I mentioned in the comment above to the build job.

[vkbo]

Any update on this? The 2.7.4 release should now be compliant with Fedora policy, so there shouldn't be a reason to not upgrade the release from 2.6 to 2.7.

[bkmgit]

Sorry for the delay. Will get to it in the next couple of days.

[bkmgit]

Updated in Rawhide https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/novelwriter/commits/rawhide

Typically, the package release version at the time the Fedora release is made is kept, but can update f43, f42 and f41 as there are no backwards incompatible breaking changes.

Would it be possible to use ttf files for the icons? Material-design-icons and font-awesome are packaged as fonts:

• https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/material-icons-fonts/blob/rawhide/f/material-icons-fonts.spec
• https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/fontawesome-fonts/blob/rawhide/f/fontawesome-fonts.spec

Fontawesome package does also have svgs.

There is also a package https://github.com/spyder-ide/qtawesome but it currently includes Remix icons, raised an issue.