Zotero for Linux

Roberto_Ronconi

@emilianoeheyns and all Zotero development team
I have some concern about the future of Zotero on Linux. I am a Linux Mint Debian Edition user. I do not use Windows or macOS. I promote free and open source software and Zotero. I hope to be able to keep using it for a long time. I also hope that the Linux version, which for now is for Debian and its derivatives, continues to be supported. https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb
I’m sharing this post.
Guía Gestor bibliográfico Zotero. Segunda edición., 2024
http://eprints.rclis.org/46116/
Best regards,
Roberto Ronconi

aborel

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, and there might be some confusion here.

First of all, the Linux version of Zotero is not Debian-specific, any user of any distribution can use the official tarball (see https://www.zotero.org/support/installation ). The deb is a very appreciated contribution of a dedicated developer.
Currently both the tarball and the deb are officially supported, are you seeing a risk that this might change? Why?

emilianoeheyns

No risk on my part. I have a vested interest in the debs as they are used in my test chain, and updates to the debs are a fully automated affair that has effectively zero maintenence effort, on zero cost infrastructure. I have no reason to change any of this.

I suspect I could fairly easily add other distros, but demand is either not there, or covered by others.

Snap/flatpak is a different matter. Also likely easy to add, and I understand the conceptual appeal, but historically they didn't seem to be easily supportable, and that seems undesirable to me.

iagogv

Another issue is that Zotero was removed some years/versions ago from Debian official repositories because of different issues, mainly because apparently Zotero downloaded Firefox and extracted and modified parts of it, and also because some node packages used by Zotero lacked in the Debian official repositories too (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=871502, https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=864827, https://wiki.debian.org/Zotero).

But I do not now which is the current situation regarding this and if solving this issue would be viable today.

emilianoeheyns

This situation has not changed and is not at all likely to change. I have at some point tried to build Debian native packages, but never got it to work. It means you have to build the firefox base from source, and that means I would have to do a build of the firefox sources. That means the Zotero team cannot trust that the binaries are the same as the ones they publish, which means they cannot realistically support them.

There is one possibility -- a shallow package like the java package that consists only of a script that downloads the Zotero binaries tarball at install time and not before, and then during install performs all the actions needed (copy/replace files, set rights, etc), and at uninstall would be scripted to remove all files it placed. I tried that too but it'd mean I would have to do all the checks that apt does, check for errors encountered during install, etc, and the package would not list the zotero files as part of the installation. The current setup is just more robust.

adamsmith

There's also the question on how desirable it would be for Zotero to be in the Debian repos. Since Zotero doesn't have ESR versions, there's a fundamental disconnect between the Debian and the Zotero release model and that'd lead to a very unsatisfactory experience for people using the Debian version where they'd report errors here only to be told that they need to use the most recent version which wouldn't actually be available through their release channel.

iagogv

@adamsmith I would say that is the least of the issues.

First, Debian users wouldn't be imposed to use Debian repositories versions, as it is common with many software, where beyond being in Debian repositories, may have versions in their own repositories and even may offer deb packages to be installed through dpkg or apt, other binary formats or the source codes.

And for those using Debian repositories versions, I believe they are conscious that the place to report issues are the Debian maintainer(s), and if doing here, they can choose between the Debian-patience or get from Zotero webpage.

Beyond that, I believe the rhythm for updating the most recent version through the release channel would depend on the maintainer(s), so not necessarily would be slow.

dstillman

Just to be clear here, we have only ever produced an official tarball for Linux, we have done so from the very first version of Zotero Standalone 14 years ago, and the only recent change with regard to Linux support is that we've added support for a major new architecture. There's absolutely no reason for "concern" about the future of Zotero on Linux.

Roberto_Ronconi

@emilianoeheyns Thanks. That’s the answer I was expecting. For me, using the repository for Debian and its derivatives is easier for installing and especially updating Zotero than using the official tarball.