Beta Testers for Sigil-2.3.0 Needed

[KevinH]

Hmm, are you sure it is a "crash" because typically a real segfault or abort can not be "caught" by Sigil at all, the program just exits immediately with no chance to save?

Was there a specific error message that is provided?

Windows Qt goes have a bug that goes back a long long way where trying to delete or rename a file, causes problems when MD (or some other anti-virus program) has grabbed control of it and is still trying to "analyze" the file and will not allow you to delete, rename, of change it in any way causing an exception that can be caught by Sigil but results in Sigil saying it has to close.

My guess is this is what you are seeing. We try to workaround this by retrying the delete/rename/change after a random interval but this is not always 100% effective, but works most of the time. Qt has had the bug reported but still have not fixed it. Although there have been some recent changes that should make the issue happen less often.

If this ever happens again, please note the very last step you used, and grab a screen shot of any failure dialog.

Thanks!

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I believe Qt has an online installer for Linux that can be used to install newer versions, but I have no experience with it.

Thanks. I had a look at it...beyond my current geek limit.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

Thanks. I had a look at it...beyond my current geek limit.

I think I can make this pretty easy for you. I went home for lunch and had the latest Sigil beta running on Ubuntu Jammy (using the latest Qt6.7.2) inside of 20 minutes or so. The installation of an alternate Qt version is made easy with a Python module called aqtinstall. From there, it's simply a matter of telling cmake to use the newer Qt6 to build (and run) Sigil.

Give me some time to cobble together some sane instructions.

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I think I can make this pretty easy for you. I went home for lunch and had the latest Sigil beta running on Ubuntu Jammy (using the latest Qt6.7.2) inside of 20 minutes or so. The installation of an alternate Qt version is made easy with a Python module called aqtinstall. From there, it's simply a matter of telling cmake to use the newer Qt6 to build (and run) Sigil.

Give me some time to cobble together some sane instructions.

That would be great, thanks!

[DiapDealer]

You should have everything you need already except for the Python module aqtinstall. This module uses the same Qt repositories that the official Qt online installer uses, so there's nothing squirrelly going on.

Install the module from PyPi with:

sudo pip install aqtinstall

I prefer sudo because you don't have to mess with adding your home bin directory to your path to use the executable scripts.

Then run:

sudo aqt install-qt --outputdir /opt/qt6 linux desktop 6.7.2 -m qtimageformats qtshadertools qtwebengine qtpdf qtwebchannel qtpositioning

This will install the Qt6.7.2 pieces that Sigil needs to /opt/qt6. Change the location if you like, but you will have to modify the next command if you do. In an empty build directory run:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/qt6/6.7.2/gcc_64 <path to Sigil source>

Obviously change <path to Sigil source> to wherever you unzipped the Sigil source code.

If everything completes successfully, you should be able to run:

make

followed by:

sudo make install

Let me know how you get on. We can move this to its own thread if it becomes more involved.

[mrprobert]

There was no dump, Sigil just quits silently. The part about renaming rings a bell though. I will make note next time but its fairly rare.

-- Mark

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by mrprobert

There was no dump, Sigil just quits silently. The part about renaming rings a bell though. I will make note next time but its fairly rare.

-- Mark

I know but I really hate segfaults! Sigil should never segfault.

[retiredbiker]

Excellent instructions, just like magic I'm running 2.3.0! Thank you DiapDealer!
I'll start exercising it tomorrow...

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

Excellent instructions, just like magic I'm running 2.3.0! Thank you DiapDealer!
I'll start exercising it tomorrow...

Great!

[KevinH]

Wow! If I had known about aqtinstall and how easy it was to use to update your Linux distribution's older Qt to a newer version, we could have moved Sigil away from Qt5 to Qt6 much sooner and kept a tighter minimum Qt version requirement.

My rolling release Manjaro is stuck on Qt 6.7.1 and Jammy can now use Qt 6.7.2!

Very nice to have a clear set of instructions!

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Wow! If I had known about aqtinstall and how easy it was to use to update your Linux distribution's older Qt to a newer version, we could have moved Sigil away from Qt5 to Qt6 much sooner and kept a tighter minimum Qt version requirement.

My rolling release Manjaro is stuck on Qt 6.7.1 and Jammy can now use Qt 6.7.2!

Very nice to have a clear set of instructions!

To be clear... aqtinstall will not "update" your system version of Qt. You're merely installing an alternate version that programs can then be compiled against and run using (I'm sure you knew that, but wanted everyone to understand). I didn't know it before yesterday, but Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) is an officially supported platform for Qt6.7. Hence my search to make it easy to install.

I also didn't know it, but I was using aqtinstall (behind the scenes) when setting up Qt environments for GitHub Actions. It can be a bit finicky about which modules you need to install, but other than that, it's come quite a ways. And it will work on Linux, Windows, and MacOS (unified libs only, I think). You don't have to use sudo, so long as you're willing to use it as a module with 'python(3) -m aqt ...', and you can install the alternate Qt versions to your own user space if you like. It's basically a scriptable cross-platform command-line version of the official Qt Online installer that doesn't require a Qt account.

It won't be patched like our Qt (but neither are the repo versions anyway), and I very much doubt that webengine's proprietary multimedia codecs are enabled, but it could come in handy for new Windows/Linux/macOS contributors to quickly test changes and submit pull requests.

[retiredbiker]

I spent a few hours today doing my usual tasks on a variety of books with the new build. Mostly, everything worked perfectly, but I found a few things:

I usually run Sigil maximised. When first opened, Sigil will open a maximised window, but an area to the right is blank. In other words, Sigil does not take up its full window. Clicking the maximise/resize window control twice fixes it. If I quit Sigil with a smaller window, it restarts in a smaller window and fills it; then maximising works fine.

PageEdit does not work, does not start. I expect I'll need a new version compiled against the Qt6.7 files. (I don't use it much, only to check a page view.)

When a search causes a new file preview to be displayed, sometimes the text in the preview is scrunched over to the left. This happens when there is an image in that file that is not coded to stay in bounds -- some large image with no code to make it display properly. This comes and goes, it is hard to repeat exactly. I don't think I've ever seen it in older versions. In the same text file, once the text is pulled back with the bottom slider, scrolling up and down past the image does not cause this...only a search.

In general, the preview screen seems to flicker and flash quite a bit, I haven't noticed this in 2.2. Hard to describe; as you do other work like maybe remove a tag pair, it happens out of the corner of your eye. A subtle thing. Black vertical bars seem to flicker on the extreme right.

As I was installing the new Qt files, I saw some file with Wayland mentioned go by, So I booted up in Wayland to see how it worked (I normally don't use it). Well, everything looks subtly different but it all seems to work OK. The one thing that is really annoying is pop-up boxes (like to inset an ID) have no borders at all and are hard to see. But I doubt Wayland stuff will be a priority any time soon.

Pictures attached to show all the above, including my video settings.

If anything else comes up, I'll post it.

[DiapDealer]

Yeah, Wayland's dialog and messagebox positioning is total nonsense.

I've not noticed any of the other issues you mentioned, but then I'm running Jammy in a virtual machine. Your issues sound a lot like a video card (or video card drivers) that Qt6.7 is close to leaving behind. You could try disabling WebEngine's hardware acceleration in Sigil's preferences. That may make those visual aberrations go away.

I never really thought about PageEdit, but rebuilding it against the same Qt6.7.2 should definitely fix it (when launching it via the external xhtml button in Sigil).

[KevinH]

Thanks for testing it and reporting back!

A few things:

- pop up dialog borders are set and controlled by your OS/Window Manager.

- search will try its best to centre the the highlighted found target in the centre of the screen. In your case the image pushed things right and forced the horizontal scroll bar into action. You can grow the Preview or detach it if needed, or Zoom it out so no scrolling is required. There has been no change to code in this area since 2.2 at all. Hopefully this is a one-off due to the lack of image formatting. If you can recreate a sample epub (single page) that shows the issue that would help.

- flashing should really be minimized in dark modes as Qt 6.7.2 includes a Qt official fix for the flashes during Preview update and load. Vertical bars on the right edge of the screen sounds like vertical scrollbar flckering in and out. I do not see this on macOS as the vertical scollbar is always there. This could be a Window Manager interaction. Maybe DiapDealer will be able to recreate it.

- Your previously compiled PageEdit with system Qt should continue to work, but recompiling PageEdit with the newer Qt to match Sigil is probably a good idea. My PageEdit is compiled with Qt 6.6.2 but my current Sigil is built with Qt 6.7.2 andit all works. But again that is macOS where each app embeds itsownQt version. All of my Linux boxes (1 real and 1 VM) only use the system Qt so I will give aqtinstall a shot to see what gives ...

- Not sure about the first start-up maximized issue. I do not see it on macOS but will try with my VM running Manjaro to see if I can recreate it.

Thanks!

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

You could try disabling WebEngine's hardware acceleration in Sigil's preferences. That may make those visual aberrations go away.

Yep, I turned that off and all the flicker stuff goes away.

The funny start-up screen is still there.