Python and Qt simplified

https://build-system.fman.io/

by BerislavLopac • 4 years ago

186 91 4 years ago

build-system.fman.io

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

Author here, thank you for sharing. Will be happy to answer any questions.

maleldil2• 4 years ago

I haven't used fbs, but fman is great. Thank you for your work.

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy you like it.

akselmo• 4 years ago

Any plans for Appimage/flatpak build support for linux?

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

Haven't gotten around to it since 2018 and don't think this will change soon. Always happy to receive contributions though.

https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs/issues/49

pacifika2• 4 years ago

Would you consider a refund policy or dry run trial with pro home?

The free version doesn’t support modern Python versions so to see if it works.

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

All but the cheapest edition come with a 31 day money back guarantee. It's written on the purchase page.

bscphil3• 4 years ago

The top comment in the thread says

Free fbs doesn’t work with recent versions of python (>3.6)

Is this true? What are the plans (if any) to update the GPL version of the project?

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

May happen at some point in the future but no immediate plans.

jll29• 4 years ago

Congrats on the Tony Hoare prize, that's very impressive, Michael.

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

Thank you! Are you at Imperial?

lrem2• 4 years ago

I already have a Qt app I would like to package now (https://github.com/lrem/FastCull). Would fbs be something to look into, or should I investigate some alternative at this point?

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

I created a Windows installer of FastCull for you.

Screenshots:

Installer: https://imgur.com/a/2zQEwMS

Application (on the right): https://imgur.com/AYhholl

Download link for the installer:

https://fbs.sh/mherrmann/FastCull/FastCullSetup.exe

My code changes are in https://github.com/mherrmann/FastCull/. You need fbs Pro because you are using PySide6.

lrem2• 4 years ago

Thank you. Seems that's not for hobby projects like these then.

hereforonep• 4 years ago

Reading articles like this is why you understand why webapps have unfortunately won

danielvaughn• 4 years ago

Not sure why you’re being downvoted - you have a point. I’m a web dev, and once tried dipping my toes into building a native GUI. I didn’t last long.

beamatronic• 4 years ago

I was a native GUI developer who once tried dipping my toes into building web apps. I didn’t last long.

knighthack• 4 years ago

This is really a symptom of the packaging scenario in Python, more than anything else. Web-apps have a lot of advantage in that regard, but desktop apps have their place, and I hold hopes that Python will come forward with better packaging tools in the long run.

BiteCode_dev2• 4 years ago

I can package python apps fine, but creating a great UI with pyqt is much harder than with tailwind + vuejs, despite the fact I'm better at python than JS.

jasfi• 4 years ago

Flutter is cross-platform, including the web. I'm working on an SDK that allows for back-end powered UIs that uses Flutter on the front-end: https://nexusdev.tools/

varajelle• 4 years ago

Because there is no need to package/deploy web apps?

boondaburrah• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what particularly you mean about this article since it seems a lot easier than webdev to me. Javascript devops and Webpack in particular drive me up the wall. Qt is usually click-button-receive-EXE (when using an IDE, otherwise qmake is pretty painless) and this seems like the equivalent in just "fbs freeze"?

dang• 4 years ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

galangalalgol3• 4 years ago

I get your point, but I wonder if the development being easier is a symptom of it being dominant rather than the cause. Web apps have a lot of other benefits that might have been the cause. I'm not a web dev, I mostly work embedded or HPC and my dev environment is either vscode or vim depending on my mood. I use plenty of cli native apps, but vscode and matlab are the only native GUIs I use. Is web development mostly done on web apps? Trying to develop in gitlab has always been painful to me for non trivial changes. It seems like anything that doesn't have huge files to move about like photo,audio or video editing could be a webapp.

vanous2• 4 years ago

fbs's source code is available on GitHub. You can use it for free in open source projects licensed under the GPL.
The free version of fbs has several limitations. Upgrade to Pro to unlock its full potential. Upon purchase, you'll receive a hosted package that you can install just like fbs. No messing around with license keys. Just pip install and you are done.

So it is more like open core. This is fine, just not clear from the front "features" page listing.

ognarb• 4 years ago

I'm getting annoyed at project saying that they are open source and then it turns out they are actually open core. I'm fine with dual licensing but not with false marketing.

mherrmann11• 4 years ago

It's a historical artifact in this case. There was no commercial offering. But then I got requests for particular features and ongoing maintenance / support. This then became the additional parts you can buy.

rat99883• 4 years ago

Unless the core is not a product that can work by itself. I'd say it's still open source. Paid closed source extensions don't make it less open source.

indymike• 4 years ago

I'm fine with dual licensing but not with false marketing.

I love getting source code, but there are places where you really are looking for Free Software, not merely open source. Open core model products are really frustrating because maybe your use case isn't one where the value is high enough to be worth paying for "pro". I run into this often when someone asks about doing charity work. I do really like it though when an open core company is clear about it.

BiteCode_dev2• 4 years ago

Open core is open source, just a layer on top of it. All the freedoms of FOSS are guaranteed for the software in the repo you are looking at.

The fact they make money by providing even more doesn't make it less open source.

bscphil3• 4 years ago

It's actually a bit worse than open core, in that the closed source version of the program works with versions of Python that have not been end-of-lifed [1] but the open source version of the program does not [2]. Because of that I'm not comfortable calling this open-anything.

This is a closed-source program that used to have a open-source version, which is now abandonware.

[1] https://devguide.python.org/devcycle/#end-of-life-branches

[2] https://build-system.fman.io/manual/#requirements

Kelteseth• 4 years ago

Weird that this project does not use Qt Installer Framework that already works cross-platform.

eql5• 4 years ago

Sure, but this project probably predates the Qt Installer.

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

QIF didn't work for me. Updates weren't detected and it didn't have support for Windows registry. I also got the impression it's in maintenance mode and not widely used.

spdegabrielle• 4 years ago

This should not be this hard or expensive. Racket can do this out of the box. I’m sure there are better ways to do this in Python.

nopenopenopeno• 4 years ago

I used this project once and it was a huge distraction. It also ended up making us have to pin the whole project to python version 3.6 when 3.9 was out because it wasn’t sufficiently maintained itself.

It was much more sustainable and maintainable to just write our own build scripts for each platform with template tags and automate from there.

brnt2• 4 years ago

I'm a satisfied user of cx_Freeze in combination with Qt, but I only build Windows installers, so YMMV.

scarygliders2• 4 years ago

I used to use cx_freeze but started having problems with it which I can't remember offhand.

I switched to PyInstaller - see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820723

spicybright2• 4 years ago

Ha, I used pyinstall and QT for the first time during a one off project. Smoothest GUI development I've ever done coming from knowing nothing about the stack. Esp. pyinstall. Had to do literally nothing for win/mac/unix builds.

To be fair though, it was a relatively simple app, but I feel that's the typical use case if you're already proficient in python and just want to add some buttons.

I don't hear about using this stack much, so I'm glad it's getting improvements + more attention!

maleldil2• 4 years ago

Pyinstaller can be a nightmare depending on what dependencies you have. I believe it doesn't copy data files by default, so you have to either write a spec file for the library or include those files yourself in your program spec.

After everything is set up, though, things usually work smoothly.

spicybright2• 4 years ago

I don't remember having to do much of that except picking what files I wanted (was a few folders in this case). It makes sense thought. You typically don't want to bundle what you don't need to, so making you set that config isn't the worst thing.

quirino• 4 years ago

I wrote a small Python program for a group of non-tech people, and all throughout development I was dreading how much time I was going to have to spend helping everyone through the installation process. But Pyinstaller made it as simple as "download and run". Super quick to set up and no one had issues at all.

m3nu• 4 years ago

At Vorta (https://github.com/borgbase/vorta/) we're also happy users of the PyQt + PyInstaller stack. Not really needed for Linux, but great for macOS. It's even possible to use Sparkle via PyObjc for automatic updates. Be sure to build "appdir" packages to get a proper macOS package that can be notarized with Apple.

dukeofdoom• 4 years ago

Can this be used to install a pygame game?

I've used Inno Setup for installing software on Windows before. It's free and works great. I've never tried installing python with it. But I did find a tutorial how to do it.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/convert-python-code-to-a-softw...

Thales• 4 years ago

Free fbs doesn’t work with recent versions of python (>3.6) [0]. You need to pay or migrate. This can lead to security issues because recent packages don’t always work with older python versions.

[0] https://build-system.fman.io/manual/#requirements

brnt2• 4 years ago

This. Python 3.6 is out of support now, 3.11 is about to be released. It's not really usable anymore.

dr_zoidberg• 4 years ago

Not just on this project, but I've seen a few more not moving past 3.8 for support and I don't quite get why that's been happening. Did something happen on 3.9 or later that didn't caught my eye?

j1elo• 4 years ago

I think the correct link would, as of right now, be to the Requirements section:

https://build-system.fman.io/manual/#requirements

Lucasoato• 4 years ago

Do you know if there are free open source alternatives to fbs and qt?

I mean free both as beer and freedom.

spacechild1• 4 years ago

Qt is available as LGPL.

galangalalgol3• 4 years ago

For the end user but for a commercial developer you have to pay I believe.

scarygliders2• 4 years ago

If you install PySide/PySide2/PySide6, you don't need to install Qt as well.

Included with PySide[2|6] is QtDesigner, hidden in the distribution but available for use, and all the compiled Qt libraries.

The application created from that can be released closed source as using Qt under LGPL.

As for packaging;

Use PyInstaller, which creates a dist directory. Included in that dist directory will be everything needed to run your Python/Qt application.

Use Inno Setup/Inno Script Studio (https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) to package that dist folder into an installer.

The end result will be a self contained installer which acts just like any other Windows software with an installer.

I use all the above to create and distribute Captain's Log (https://captainslog.scarygliders.net)

_fizz_buzz_• 4 years ago

I am using kivy for a small project. Works pretty well for me.

https://kivy.org/

spectrallus• 4 years ago

I have owned this sowftware for about a year and can say the author did a good job. It's worth it.

With that said, this may not necessarily be fault of the authors, but the tutorial and documentation really doesn't help. The Qt and PyQt/PySide ecosystem is so fragmented that understanding how to truly use fbs only came to me after months of browsing github for example code.

Something like a video tutorial series on YouTube that shows how to use Qt Creator with QWidgets with fbs would be great then another on how to use Qt Design Studio with QtQuick with fbs would be amazing.

jollybean• 4 years ago

Anyone care to comment on 'Why Python'?

Javascript is quite commonly established as a good UI language these days, and I assume that anyone who can write Py can write Js.

Is there something particularly useful about Py, i.e. perhaps researchers who know Py may not want to bother to switch? Or that it integrates better with some things? Or that it's used widely at a company and investing in a second language is a big deal?

uranusjr• 4 years ago

My guess is it’s because PyQt. AFAIK there’s not a JS binding (or any other language really) for Qt that’s nearly as established and steady. If you’re going with Qt, Python is the most reasonable choice (other than native C++ of course).

pacifika2• 4 years ago

A preference for developing in Python.

bscphil3• 4 years ago

What libraries should I rely on to create cross-platform native (or native-approximating) UIs in JS?

digisign2• 4 years ago

Historically it was a much more productive choice, than just about anything. Today it's merely an arguably more productive one. In any case it remains a good choice, and one of the most popular languages.

Despite years of FUD from the likes of Microsoft and others, "investing in a second language" is not a big deal at all and just short of required for projects of any complexity.

BlueTemplar3• 4 years ago

And for those who would need Python and Qt "complexified" :

https://www.pyqtgraph.org/

PyQtGraph is a pure-python graphics and GUI library built on PyQt / PySide and numpy. It is intended for use in mathematics / scientific / engineering applications. Despite being written entirely in python, the library is very fast due to its heavy leverage of NumPy for number crunching and Qt's GraphicsView framework for fast display. PyQtGraph is distributed under the MIT open-source license.

[...]

Packaging for Distribution Applications written with pyqtgraph may be packaged as Windows exe files using py2exe or OSX dmg files using py2app.

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

The problem with QT is its license. All commercial applications I've seen are pre-v6 due to GPL license.

detaro2• 4 years ago

That doesn't make any sense, not much relevant about which modules are GPL has changed with the release of Qt6. Not that the licensing situation doesn't have problems, but that specific thing can't really be it.

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

My understanding was that there are significant changes between QT5 and QT6, at least that is the reason I was told by people that used it in our company. There was a warning to never upgrade to QT6. I am just going by the observation, could be wrong though.

Regardless, the licensing is a total nightmare, you can see it in Riverside's own forums: https://pyqt.riverbankcomputing.narkive.com/hqREGR1W/a-nasty...

pjfin123• 4 years ago

This looks like a cool project, I had issues packaging Qt apps with Python for the Argos Translate GUI https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate-gui

Python and Qt simplified

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