A user recently informed me of an issue with the Windows release of Tetzle: there were missing DLLs that prevented Tetzle from running! Interestingly, the builds ran on my computers without a hitch so when I had tested them before making the release I didn’t notice the issue. I have uploaded new builds of Tetzle 3.0 for Windows, so the issue has been solved.

What happened, as far as I can tell, is that the windeployqt.exe executable from the binary release of Qt 6.7.2 apparently thinks everything is compiled with MSVC instead of MinGW. 🤦 Which means that when it went looking for the compiler runtime libraries—libstdc++-6.dll, etc—it couldn’t find the correct ones.

I solved this by grabbing the windeployqt.exe executable from an earlier Qt binary release and used the qtpaths.exe executable from Qt 6.7.2 so that it would find the correct libraries and plugins, and everything was fine. I suppose I could have just copied the few missing DLLs by hand this time, but now I have everything set up so that I can avoid this issue in the future.

This shows how important it is to inform me of issues: if I don’t know about them, I can’t fix them! Don’t assume somebody has already reported it. 🙂

I am sorry to say that I no longer support the macOS. The ancient Mac I was using to build my programs has finally died, and I do not intend to buy a new one. This means that I can’t provide prebuilt binaries of my projects. I’m sorry to disappoint the many macOS users of FocusWriter, but there will not be any new official macOS downloads on my website.

However, my software is open source, and users can continue to build their own binaries if they wish. Additionally, if users want to get my projects into something like MacPorts, I am happy to merge patches necessary for that.

It took me much longer than I expected to make the most recent Whisker Menu release, all because the RPMs would not build. I forgot to include the new manpage in the %files section of the RPM spec file at first, and then every attempt I made to add it did not work. I tried listing the manpage path with %{_mandir}, then just hardcoding the full path, and finally telling it to grab all of the files installed by my package under %{_mandir}.

None of those approaches worked, which left me both baffled and a bit frustrated. And then I noticed I had been forgetting to increase the “Release” number in the spec file. Oops! Such a simple mistake. Once I fixed that they built fine. Long story short, always double check that you increased the “Release” number when you make a change to a RPM spec file!

After struggling with making Ubuntu packages in the OBS I have come to conclusion that I was wrong when I decided to remove my personal package archive. Yes, it is a hassle to create packages for both as I already create Debian packages for the OBS. However, it is more of a headache to use the OBS for Ubuntu packages because the OBS does not enable the universe repository.

I have decided to add back a PPA for my packages, and I will be updating my website shortly. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience to Ubuntu users caused by my switching to the OBS from a PPA, and now by my switching back to a PPA from the OBS. Please accept my sincerest apologies, and these new packages. 🙂

I should have announced this sooner, but better late than never I suppose. I will no longer be creating new PowerPC builds of my programs. There are many reasons, but the biggest two are that my iBook G3 finally gave up the ghost, and that Qt has dropped support for PowerPC. I know that this is an inconvenience for some of my users, and I am sorry about that. Still, I hung in there as long as I could, but Apple has moved on.