Arch Linux User Repository

I thought electron20 was still an officially supported package in Arch, but I guess not :\. I'll update it to electron22 which is what the git release is using. Not officially supported by Freetube, but it should work.

@reclusivesage, actually one can rebuild freetube, without changing its version, and furthermore the latest plain electron, which is in fact electron25 (25.2.1-1), builds and runs fine freetube. So there's no no need to install non official stock electrons for freetube.

Electron is a mess, and issues with versions proliferate across all electron AUR apps.

I had an error about a missing Chromium/Electron 20 .so missing, which prevented FreeTube from starting, so I fixed it by installing electron20-bin from the AUR. (Updating the OS to update Chromium won't fix this FreeTube issue.)

This will suffice until FreeTube upgrades to a currently supported version of Electron.

Ok, I though these kind of switching to the fixed branch of a package would be solved without manually dealing with it. Nothing broken then!

@tuxayo: This is nothing new when Electron packages are updated.

sudo pacman -Syu electron20

I wonder why the upgrade of electron from 20 to 22 causes pikaur, yay and pacman[1] to choke with:

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) :: installing electron (22.0.0-1) breaks dependency 'electron20' required by freetube

Given that the electron20 package is in the official repos.

Is there actually an issue with dependencies of the packages?

[1] pacman should also work right? Because there is no freetube update and the electron upgrade should cause to install the electron20 package alongside of electron.

It might be better to depend on electron16-bin by default because building electron16 for me is a pain. It take a long time also breaks from time to time. The current error is:

==> Starting build()...
ERROR at //build/config/linux/pkg_config.gni:103:17: Script returned non-zero exit code.
    pkgresult = exec_script(pkg_config_script, args, "value")
                ^----------
Current dir: /home/owen/.cache/yay/electron16/src/src/out/Release/
Command: python3 /home/owen/.cache/yay/electron16/src/src/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py opus
Returned 1.
stderr:

Could not run pkg-config.

See //third_party/opus/BUILD.gn:8:1: whence it was called.
pkg_config("opus_config") {
^--------------------------
See //BUILD.gn:764:7: which caused the file to be included.
      "//third_party/opus:opus_demo",
      ^-----------------------------
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
    Aborting...
 -> error making: electron16

I switched to use electron16-bin and freetube installed quickly.

The upstream Freetube is using electron 20, but I was keeping this as electron16 until a proper release with electron 20 came out. I can still change this 0.17.1 to use electron20 if electron16 being now an AUR package is too much of a bother.

@reclusivesage, have you read prior posts? The reason for that failure is electron16 requiring a rebuild, given Arch changes on libraries it depends on, but Arch already dropped electron16, so you need to rebuild it from AUR, if you want to keep using electron16.

There's no reason to stick with electron16 though, I shared a patch on the AUR package to use electron20 instead. Which changes exactly what you're mentioning... And if you don't want to rebuild freetube, there's the workaround to just edit /usr/bin/freetube and specify there the use of electron20 instead of electron16.

Now the reason this package is affected, is that it uses a system electron, rather than using the binary copy embedded in the binary version of freetube. And that's good. Many of the binaries depending on electron, keep duplicating electron everywhere, which is really unnecessary, bloated and a sad practice. However it requires to update the package when necessary, as it is now. I would try keeping the system electron version used, the latest on Arch, and only decrease the version if it doesn't work or is plain unsupported. But it is up to the AUR packager, if it works with a non latest version, and it's maintained by Arch, well, they might opt not to change it. Not the case right now, since the package needs to change its dependency, given Arch dropping electron16, and therefore not rebuilding it for us.