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To avoid crashs when opening PDF's install mendeleydesktop-bundled which packages Qt provided by the upstream.

@heavysink Thanks for the prompt reaction and thanks for the tip :)

To avoid crashs when opening PDF's install mendeleydesktop-bundled which packages Qt provided by the upstream.

Hi,

I have deleted the mendeleydesktop-bundle package.

A suggestion: the new version checking can be done by

curl -n https://www.mendeley.com/release-notes | grep -o 'Desktop v[0-9].*' | head -n 1 | sed 's/<\/a><\/span><\/div><\/li>//g' | sed 's/Desktop v//g'

This package crash whenever tried to open a pdf file. Meanwhile, I have tested the bundle package and it seems to work fine for me. Sure, It is a just a temporal solution while the Mendeley developers don't build the package with the Qt 5.11 libraries. But it is the one that will work for most of the users. I think that to build the bundled package will be enough to change a few lines in the PKGBUILD, namely no dependencies and update the checksums to the 1.19.2-2 files. Something like this:

pkgname=mendeleydesktop
pkgver=1.19.2
pkgrel=2
pkgdesc="Academic software for managing and sharing research papers (desktop client). Includes all needed Qt5 libraries in order to avoid crashing while opens a file."
url=http://www.mendeley.com/release-notes/
arch=(i686 x86_64)
depends=()
license=(custom:mendeley_eula)
source_i686=("https://desktop-download.mendeley.com/download/linux/$pkgname-$pkgver-linux-i486.tar.bz2")
source_x86_64=("https://desktop-download.mendeley.com/download/linux/$pkgname-$pkgver-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2")
sha512sums_i686=('b8b8b291a2b2d3cf43ec96005f891b9acd73090c945252b0b22abbc71c631bd74c9cf600c3c5e2c75ee3784a3ac3d06d8d925b5a70a3e47e34901047f67ca587')
sha512sums_x86_64=('ddcbac4f863706f1226157a4528d89801502af6d5af105558ee1b3a5ecad4ba4c90ff64dffd822f485d45670c6ad54cae93f9a582a5bc82bc23e404c767aca40')

During this weekend I'll make 2 options for this package, native and bundled.

@R.mj Try this if you can't wait. https://github.com/mchwalisz/mendeleydesktop_aur/blob/master/PKGBUILD

So, finally, is there no solutions apart from reading PDFs with an external software? What if I downgrade Qt, will it help? Is it surely only because Qt issue? Since its Qt, I don't dare to modify it unless I am sure about it.
Suggestions please.

@p1gd0g mine have not because it happened long ago and not in the latest round of crazy bugs they had. But even today try turning of pdf syncing and remove Mendeley entirely, install it again, and let it reindex the same pdfs. Most likely it will not connect some pdfs with annotations. The whole system is very fragile and it is only so because they try to lock down users to their platform by separating annotations from pdfs. I think the library they use for pdf's is perfectly capable of saving annotations in pdf's.

@akstrfn My notes have resumed, don't yours?

@egrupled I plan to change the pkgbuild so that it provides both options but I am still hoping they just rebuild with qt5.11. This was probably delayed because of all the issues they had with 1.19 release.

As for the benefits: - The full package is ~450mb and this one is around ~100mb (this was around 80mb in 1.18) - All the minor releases of Qt are in Arch repos before the upstream provides them. - Also all other shared libraries are more up to date (including ssl). - System integration is better with native shared libs.

Another points is that using internal viewer to annotate the pdf's is a bad idea. They lock you down into their viewer and the latest data loss they had just shows how bad it can get. I never use their internal pdf anyway because I had major data loss two years ago. So their pdf system not working is perhaps a good thing.

So you should complain upstream to get better packaging and stop bundleing everything, because while they are at it they should probably statically link and bundle the whole OS. When you complain here they don't see it.