AUR broken packages vs working cloning source and execution

[Elia-Sh]

Hi, TL;DR I suspect that the AUR packages are broken, after installation of pencil from AUR, pencil will hang with a spinning logo, probably need to update PKGBUILD in aur..

No error messages during execution -

  $ pencil 
  useHWAConfig:  false
  Hardware acceleration disabled for Linux.
  Background web-printer started.
  Shortcut main service started.
  (node:88769) ProtocolDeprecateCallback: The callback argument of protocol module APIs is no longer needed.
  (Use `electron --trace-warnings ...` to show where the warning was created)

• Operating system:

  Operating System: Arch Linux                       
          Kernel: Linux 5.13.6-arch1-1
    Architecture: x86-64

• Pencil version:

  Electron v13.1.8 | Chromium v91.0.4472.164 | Node v14.16.0 | v8 v9.1.269.39-electron.0

  install from AUR - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pencil/

  $ pacman -Q --info pencil
  Name            : pencil
  Version         : 3.1.0-7
  Description     : Sketching and GUI prototyping/wireframing tool
  Architecture    : any
  URL             : https://github.com/evolus/pencil
  Licenses        : GPL2
  Groups          : None
  Provides        : None
  Depends On      : electron
  Optional Deps   : None
  Required By     : None
  Optional For    : None
  Conflicts With  : evolus-pencil-bin  pencil-v2
  Replaces        : None
  Installed Size  : 48.32 MiB
  Packager        : Unknown Packager
  Build Date      : Tue 10 Aug 2021 10:43:38 PM IDT
  Install Date    : Wed 11 Aug 2021 09:11:39 AM IDT
  Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
  Install Script  : No
  Validated By    : None

  also tested - evolus-pencil-git - resulted in same execution with spinning logo.

  $ pacman -Q --info evolus-pencil-git
  Name            : evolus-pencil-git
  Version         : 1521.f1309bc-1
  Description     : An open-source GUI prototyping tool
  Architecture    : x86_64
  URL             : http://pencil.evolus.vn/
  Licenses        : GPL2
  Groups          : None
  Provides        : evolus-pencil-bin  evolus-pencil-avn
  Depends On      : electron
  Optional Deps   : None
  Required By     : None
  Optional For    : None
  Conflicts With  : evolus-pencil-bin  evolus-pencil-svn
  Replaces        : evolus-pencil-svn
  Installed Size  : 65.15 MiB
  Packager        : Unknown Packager
  Build Date      : Wed 11 Aug 2021 09:41:32 AM IDT
  Install Date    : Wed 11 Aug 2021 09:44:09 AM IDT
  Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
  Install Script  : No
  Validated By    : None

The awesome thing is that building the source from git, results in successful execution of the app.

$ npm start

> start
> ./node_modules/.bin/electron ./app

useHWAConfig:  false
Hardware acceleration disabled for Linux.
Background web-printer started.
Shortcut main service started.
(node:88934) ProtocolDeprecateCallback: The callback argument of protocol module APIs is no longer needed.
(node:88934) electron: The default of contextIsolation is deprecated and will be changing from false to true in a future release of Electron.  See https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/23506 for more information
(node:88984) [DEP0005] DeprecationWarning: Buffer() is deprecated due to security and usability issues. Please use the Buffer.alloc(), Buffer.allocUnsafe(), or Buffer.from() methods instead.
Shortcut: Super+F12 registered
RENDERER started.
(node:88934) electron: The default of contextIsolation is deprecated and will be changing from false to true in a future release of Electron.  See https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/23506 for more information

Starting the pencil-cloned-from-git-app with global electron works as well -

 which electron
/usr/bin/electron
$ electron -v                                                                                                   
v13.1.8
$ pwd
/home/elia/git/pencil
$ electron ./app
useHWAConfig:  false
Hardware acceleration disabled for Linux.
Background web-printer started.
Shortcut main service started.
(node:89197) ProtocolDeprecateCallback: The callback argument of protocol module APIs is no longer needed.
(Use `electron --trace-warnings ...` to show where the warning was created)
(node:89245) [DEP0005] DeprecationWarning: Buffer() is deprecated due to security and usability issues. Please use the Buffer.alloc(), Buffer.allocUnsafe(), or Buffer.from() methods instead.
(Use `exe --trace-deprecation ...` to show where the warning was created)
Shortcut: Super+F12 registered
RENDERER started.

The above does not work with the installed version from AUR - the app still hangs on the spinning logo.

[hoaivan]

You should use electron9. There was compatible issue with electron 13.

[Elia-Sh]

Hi @hoaivan,

Could you please elaborate about the comparability issue between latest electron and the version used by pencil?

I was able to use pencil with electron 13 - latest available electron version on arch linux, and as described in my comment above, did not see any issues with pencil.

in addition I've created a new AUR package that follows the development branch on evolus/pencil @ github - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/evolus-pencil-git-dev-branch/ tested installation on arch linux this one works as expected - no hang spinning logos, app currently works as expected.

This is the version built from the new evolus-pencil-git-dev-branch AUR package from the current development branch -

pacman -Q evolus-pencil-git-dev-branch
evolus-pencil-git-dev-branch r1540.043ca48-1

installs the corresponding with latest commit in development branch: 043ca48d89149449f3856cb890a8444bc413fa23

[Elia-Sh]

using the development tracking AUR package solves the spinning logo + hanged app on execution, I've opened https://github.com/evolus/pencil/issues/699 to progress the master branch.

[hoaivan]

@Elia-Sh I tried electron13 on development branch. No more hang spinning logo but i found 2 other issues:

• Broken backgroud when i tried to set a page as background of others
• Very slow saving to file

Switch back to electron9 on development branch solves all these!

Notes: I'm on Manjaro