A simple debugger to check and verify files and correct operation of … #7792
Conversation
…the software in Linux
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A simple debugger to check and verify files and correct operation of the software in Linux |
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Hi and thanks for the contribution 👍 I like the idea of verifying an installation, but I feel this approach will be brittle, since things like the number of files and certainly the hashes will change fairly often and will need to be manually updated. If you want to use this approach, probably we need a way to automatically calculate the check values from a known-good installation. On the other hand, it could be better to define a correct installation functionally, meaning we would check if the software is able to run and perform certain operations correctly. This approach could have the added advantage of working across platforms and might catch errors that the current script wouldn't catch. Maybe you can describe in more detail why you think this script is needed. In my experience if the tar.gz file is correctly downloaded and extracted everything should be okay. Maybe we need a better way to check the hash of the downloaded archive? |
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Thank you for your detailed review |
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Did you see we provide checksums for the downloads? I think it would be easier and more scalable to provide scripts that download the archives and then confirm these checksums. |
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Note that you don't need to scrape the dowoad site but you can get the information using a web API. For example, you can find release information here: https://download.slicer.org/find?os=win&stability=release It was just an example, there should be some other API to get checksum of a specific release version. |
As far as I know, download.slicee.org site is not blocked anywhere in the world. Why do you think people would download the file from unknown sources instead? @RafaelPalomar has been working on making Slicer available in Linux app stores. Maybe you could join his efforts with him. By the way Windows and macOS (that is used by almost all "amateur" users) has per-file integrity check already (in the Windows installer and in macOS signed binaries). If Slicer is added to a linux app store then all files would be fingerprinted on Linux, too. Fingerprint check at every startup could be useful for regulatory approvals, but tour script does not do an exact check. It could be useful to have an automatic troubleshooter for diagnosing and fixing startup issues, but your script does very little of that. Having an application error reporter (collect system information, logs, stack trace of a crash, etc. and make it easy to send it) would be useful, too but your script does not really do this. Checking system health (free disk space, temporary folder writable, etc.) could be nice, but we do some of this already and ir should be part of the application startup process and work on all operating systems. So, we need to step.back step and figure out what problem you want to solve and improve on the existing solutions for that. You can jo8n our next developer meeting on Tuesday to discuss this in person - https://discourse.slicer.org/c/community/hangout/20 |
Yes, I have been working on a flatpak version of Slicer:
I would like to re-take on this effort when I have a little bit more time. All help welcome |
…the software in Linux