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#1 2017-02-09 16:29:36

hoelzro
Member
Registered: 2007-01-14
Posts: 8

Anki 2.1 Alpha: Broken addons and images

I found this post about the new Anki version (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=222930); I started to reply but then I felt I had hijacked the thread.

I encountered some unpleasant surprises when I tried to use Anki last night; here's what I discovered:

python2-qt4, as of  4.12-2, dropped support for qtwebkit.  Looking at the discussion here (https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/a … 28640.html), it seems to have been
dropped due to concerns about its lack of maintainence.  However, this broke Anki (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/52872) and other programs (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/52875).  So, in the
case of Anki, the maintainers upgraded to 2.1.0a10, an alpha release of the next version of Anki.

I didn't see the issue where my profile wasn't discovered; Anki loaded my decks just fine.  However, I did find two problems:

  * Most of my addons are broken.
  * I can't paste images into a new note, which I use for every note.

My addons are broken because Anki 2.1 appears to have made the jump to Python 3.  Fixing my addons wasn't too bad - just alarming.

Not being able to paste images is a dealbreaker for Anki, though.  I do this for every note I make, so I can't use the new Anki until this is fixed upstream.

My solution for the time being has been to downgrade anki and python2-pyqt4 (to 4.12-1) and have pacman ignore them for the time being.

Now that my rant is over, I just want to point out that I appreciate the devs' work to package up third party software, and to stay aware of potential issues with unmaintained software like qtwebkit.  They are taking their time out of their day to do this so that I (and others like me) don't have to.  I'm just frustrated because I use Anki to study languages, and I didn't want to spend my hour of language learning time last night fixing addons and figuring out how I could keep using Anki.  I'd be interested in having further discussions on how to make other Anki users' lives easier while still maintaining the quality of the package ecosystem!

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#2 2017-02-09 16:36:08

frostschutz
Member
Registered: 2013-11-15
Posts: 1,409

Re: Anki 2.1 Alpha: Broken addons and images

It's not quite ready for end users yet... (it's alpha for a reason)

If you want to help with alpha testing you should give developer feedback over here https://anki.tenderapp.com/discussions/beta-testing and with any luck you'll get a fix in the next alpha

make sure you use the latest alpha version before reporting issues

as for broken addons, this is only to be expected, this is up to the addon maintainers to update their stuff. but that probably won't happen until anki 2.1 is out of alpha.

(firefox has the same problem, they're currently breaking all addons and moving onto webextension stuff)

Last edited by frostschutz (2017-02-09 16:37:26)

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#3 2017-02-09 21:18:30

itektur
Member
Registered: 2014-03-01
Posts: 19

Re: Anki 2.1 Alpha: Broken addons and images

hoelzro wrote:

Not being able to paste images is a dealbreaker for Anki, though.  I do this for every note I make, so I can't use the new Anki until this is fixed upstream.

Thanks for the heads-up. In my decks, there is not a single note without at least one image so this is really important for me as well.

hoelzro wrote:

My solution for the time being has been to downgrade anki and python2-pyqt4 (to 4.12-1) and have pacman ignore them for the time being.

Just to make sure that I won't lose any data or run into other issues, I'll also stick to the old version for now. Thank you for pinpointing the culprit.

hoelzro wrote:

I'm just frustrated because I use Anki to study languages, and I didn't want to spend my hour of language learning time last night fixing addons and figuring out how I could keep using Anki.

I also use Anki to study languages and I am so glad that you digged into this issue. Thank you very much.

hoelzro wrote:

I'd be interested in having further discussions on how to make other Anki users' lives easier while still maintaining the quality of the package ecosystem!

First of all, thanks to the maintainers from me as well! I was thinking about this issue, too, but I guess there is no simple solution. Just to give food for thought, I think it would already be great if one could just look up breaking dependencies (including version information!) whenever one is forced to choose between security and stability to such an extent. That is, it would be great if the package maintainers could also maintain such a database so the users do not need to figure this out by themselves. (Maybe this could even be integrated into pacman!) On the other hand, this would mean extra work for the maintainers, probably for only little gain, so I totally understand them when they say that they cannot afford it.

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#4 2017-02-09 23:15:58

shudouken
Member
Registered: 2015-03-27
Posts: 8

Re: Anki 2.1 Alpha: Broken addons and images

I am also having the problems you mentioned, in addition to that I can't type in Japanese with fcitx-mozc anymore.

I ran fcitx-diagnose, but it tells me qt4 and qt5 is setup correctly, so I don't quite know where the issue lies.

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#5 2017-02-10 12:48:24

misc
Member
From: Bavaria, Germany
Registered: 2010-03-22
Posts: 115

Re: Anki 2.1 Alpha: Broken addons and images

There's an official statement from the Anki developers as well:

Arch Linux has packaged an alpha build that could cause data loss

It appears that an alpha build of Anki has been included in the Arch package manager. The alpha builds are not ready for regular use yet, and bugs could cause data loss, so it should not have been packaged. If you are an Arch user, please uninstall the alpha and report the issue to the package maintainer.

The latest stable release of Anki is 2.0.42, and compiled builds of it are available on https://apps.ankiweb.net.

(Just like frostschutz wrote… it's an alpha. Who'd have thought that pushing it to a release repository is a bad idea. roll)

For myself, a) none of my plugins work, b) uim still hasn't seen a release (or package update from git) that includes the required qt5 support, and c) I couldn't sync until I installed a10 with the latest git fixes.

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#6 2017-02-12 19:38:20

alg
Member
Registered: 2016-11-20
Posts: 1

Re: Anki 2.1 Alpha: Broken addons and images

I should have read this thread before doing `pacman -Syu`. I was also unpleasantly surprised to see it cannot even start.

I'll try now the official latest stable compiled version now, hope that it would work!

Edit: ok it seems to wokr fine (I'm not using any images though). Syncing with ankiweb causes no problems, either.

Last edited by alg (2017-02-12 19:49:52)

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