Ubuntu Focal update of broken Calibre package

[Dmitry Shachnev]

Hi Norbert, Lukasz and all!

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 09:06:35AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> (please Cc)
>
> I am the Debian maintainer of Calibre, and unfortunately it seems that
> for Focal Ubuntu has pulled a preliminary version of Calibre, which is
> **seriously** broken and unusable, not even starting in most cases.
>
> We were forced by the Python3 transition to temporarily ship pre-release
> versions of Calibre. In particular, Ubuntu Focal ships
> 	4.99.4+dfsg+really4.12.0-1build1
> which is version 4.12 with experimental Python3 patches on top of it.
> This worked for a short time being until Calibre 5 was released with
> proper Python3 support.
>
> Due to this unfortunate squeeze in release timing, Ubuntu Focal users
> now have a seriously broken Calibre, and upstream is swamped with bug
> reports.
>
> I would strongly suggest and support, and help preparing, an update to
> Focal based on the current version in Debian/testing, 5.2.0+dfsg-1,
> which has been out since quite some time and field-tested with Python3
> in various environments, due to upstream having switched to Py3, too.

Unfortunately, Calibre 5.x requires SIP 5 and PyQt5 that is built against
SIP 5. Moving PyQt5 to the new SIP is a major transition, that happened
in Debian recently (two weeks ago) and did not happen in Ubuntu yet because
of freeze.

This requires changes in many packages simultaneously: at least pyqt5,
pyqt5charts, pyqt5webengine, qscintilla2, calibre, python-poppler-qt5,
veusz, krita and qgis.

I am planning to land this change early in Groovy+1 cycle.

> Is the above (update to 5.2.0) possible in Ubuntu Focal, and if yes,
> what kind if steps are necessary?

So for Focal and Groovy we need a version of Calibre that still uses SIP 4.
Last such version in Debian was 4.99.12+dfsg+really4.23.0-1, Groovy already
has that. If you know some specific fixes, maybe they can be applied on top
of what Focal or Groovy has.

--
Dmitry Shachnev
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