worstje
commented
4 years ago First of all, thank you for showing your interest and possibly volunteering your time and effort. 👍
Current state & caveats
I don't know FreeBSD, so I am not sure what would currently prevent Manuskript from working on it, or what would be the proper way to package for it.
At its core, Manuskript requires a recentish version of Python 3 (3.5+ I guess?), a recentish version of PyQt (I'd say >5.10), and some Python packages that can be installed through pip. That may sound a bit vague, but that is in part due to some attempts to stay runnable on old platforms (WXP) or LTS releases and all the nightmares that entails. (Somewhere on the wiki is a document that outlines our intentions in regards to new features and future releases, but it isn't particularly nailed down to specific versions or platforms/distributions yet.)
For Windows, we prepare a package using PyInstaller, and for Mac I am not sure about the how/what since it has been a while since we've had anyone who uses a Mac and I think there's been a report of it being broken at one point. Whatever might be the case, there is at least one Mac-related PR sitting unattended.
This is not meant to discourage you, but rather to be clear upfront that the 'requirements' to get Manuskript running are a little bit murky at this time on some platforms.
My recommendations on supporting OpenBSD (or all BSD?)
At this point, you'll at least know that you may end up into some version issues.
As such, I'd recommend first trying to get Manuskript working from source. See the Linux instructions which I assume are most suitable as a starting point.
If you run into issues after resolving the dependencies themselves, you have two options. If you are a bit familiar with getting your hands dirty, using git and submitting pull requests, then you can definitely submit a pull request with a fix. Otherwise, submit an issue with a clear description of the shortcomings and hopefully one someone capable will be able to identify / fix it... but depending on how OS-specific it is, your mileage may vary.
Finally, after you successfully manage to get Manuskript running from source code, it becomes time to look into the best way to package it for your platform. I have no clue how any of the BSDs work, so barring any other developers here who know their BSDs, this is where it would be fully on you to figure out the way things are supposed to be done.
And in the very end, there of course needs to be documentation that let's our lovely maintainer build the relevant packages whenever a new version releases.
If you have any questions, please ask and I'll try my best to offer what little knowledge I have. 😄
Less of a serious/critical issue and more of a question. Are there any plans to port Manuskript to other platforms such as the BSD's more specifically OpenBSD. I would be more than willing to assist. To clarify I love Manuskript to death and writing with it makes things so much easier so to have it on the BSD's would make life easier.