For how much would you port Delta.chat to ARM / Raspberry Pi?

Hi,

My laptop died the same day a friend of mine gave me a Raspberry Pi, so it looks like Raspbian will be my main OS for a few months at least, and I’m so sad that I can’t use Delta.chat, because I’ve kind of become dependant on it (or should I say addicted to it?). I really can’t go back to Thunderbird or Geary now that I’ve had a taste of Delta.chat’s slick UI.

I saw that I’m not the only one who would be glad to see Delta.chat ported to ARM/Raspberry, but I have neither the skill nor the time to try it myself, so I was wondering for how much someone would be willing to do it.

I won’t finance the whole thing myself, but I’m testing the water here to see if:

  1. someone is willing to do it
  2. for how much
  3. how many people are willing to crowdfund this feature, and how much can we raise collectively to finance this

Personally, I’m willing to give around ~20€, but this amount could raise a bit if I can’t take the pain of not having Delta.chat on my present desktop.

Plus, I’m working on a Raspberry project with a friend, trying to give the internet back to the people, and we would really like to install Delta.chat at the same time as IPFS and other cool stuff.

First time creating a feature bounty, so any advice on how to do this is welcome. How should we proceed? Kickstarter? OpenCollective? Bountysource?

Thanks,

Boris

I assume you’re talking about deltachat-desktop? You can actually get that for ARM right now, even though there is no official Flatpak or AppImage. If you’re running a 64-bit version of Raspbian and don’t want to compile things yourself (which might not even be possible on weak ARM devices), you can e.g. get it with the Nix package manager:

  • Install Nix as described here. That script will modify ~/.profile and print instructions for updating your $PATH in case you don’t want to log out and log in again.
  • Install deltachat-desktop using nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA deltachat-desktop. You should now have deltachat in your $PATH and hopefully in your launcher.
  • Keep it up to date using nix-channel --update && nix-env -u --always.

You can also install KDeltaChat (-iA kdeltachat) and Cursed Delta (-iA deltachat-cursed) that way.

Yep.

Thanks for the alternative solutions. These won’t do for me though.

I need something that:

  • I can install quickly next time I reinstall an OS
  • a script can install easily and quickly
  • works right off the bat (tried your solutions but they don’t [EDIT: Nix solution does, after logging out and in again], and though 15 years ago I would have use my time to search for why, my time left on Earth has so dramatically been reduced since then, that I prefer something more straightforward).

In short, I think what I need is a turnkey solution, a plug-and-play solution, such as a .deb or a .AppImage, something that works without the time and the hassle of having to install another package manager, be it snap, flatpak or nix.

Who has the time × competence × energy × motivation* to create and ARM deb?

*How much money can help you get motivated enough?


EDIT : Would a platform oriented towards regular payments (such as Patreon) be the right choice? It would make sense to reward the packager regularly, since this job is not a one-time thing but shall be done at each new release of Delta.chat?

If you installed deltachat-desktop this way, you’ll have to follow these steps once to install the newest version:

  • Uninstall the old one using nix-env -e deltachat-desktop-unstable.
  • Update the local package database using nix-channel --update.
  • Install the new one using nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA deltachat-desktop.